dovegreyreader scribbles

Dublin's streets broad and narrow...

Very many moons ago, before I had even started my nurse training in fact, I had a rather sophisticated and learned boyfriend who bought me a copy of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde and impressed upon me that if I didn't get along with this book I wasn't going to get along with him.
I made a half-hearted attempt sensing that this was already going nowhere, read Dorian Gray and The Ballad of Reading Gaol and that was about it. I was unceremoniously dumped, which was all to the good because Bookhound was out there waiting a few years down the line, but I have had a bit of a soft spot for the plight of poor old Oscar and his terrible demise ever since.
That argument with the wallpaper as he died in semi-poverty in Paris, and in what can only have been the most excruciating agony from meningitis and the mastoid abcess which reputedly did unspeakable things in the minutes after his death in 1900.
I've visited Oscar Wilde's grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery so I took in his house and memorial whilst in Dublin, doubtless happier times for Oscar when he lived at 1 Merrion Square.

And his memorial directly opposite finds him sprawled and with a rather wry, sardonic look to his face as he looks across to his old abode.

By now I'm too late and miles away from the start of the guided walking tour of Joycean sites suggested by my hosts at Discover Ireland, so I revert to Plan B, the dovegreyreader tour, whilst my feet are giving me a strong message that it's time to test out the free pass on the Tourist Bus.
I'm heading to The Writer's Museum in Parnell Square, it's quite a trek and I'm already carrying seven volumes of Joyce Studies, but on the way to the bus stop I can't pass the National Gallery of Ireland without nipping into the shop and perusing the cards, which would at least give me an idea of what I'm missing by not going in.
If there's one painting of many I would like to have found it is this one, The Doll's School by Walter Osborne.

I'm always reminded of this Marty Feldman sketch when I see a tourist bus (phrases from this have entered our family vernacular...on your left the Houses of Parliament ...everyone back on the bus) so I hopped on and watched  and listened incredulously as the female bus driver multi-tasked, negotiating a double decker bus around Dublin's Saturday morning traffic whilst giving a highly informative and amusing talk about the sights we were passing. I'm considerably wiser about Georgian architecture... the little windows at the top to give an appearance of height, the one and only front door in the city made into a double one because Royalty were expected to visit and could only walk through double doors, though in the end they failed to turn up.
But I was missing the streets so I hopped off again at St Stephen's Green and walked along Grafton Street; pure pleasure to watch the street entertainers and The Bird Man, one of the best living statues I have seen, not a flinch and with real pigeons hopping all over him.

Then over O'Connell Bridge and up O'Connell Street towards Parnell Square past The Spire to the James Joyce statue.
The Spire, the most extraordinary 120 metre high stainless steel, needle-like structure that almost seems to be touching the clouds, making for the most uninteresting picture with my little camera that does nothing to convey its impressiveness.

The James Joyce statue was 'occupied' when I got there and I had to agree to take a picture of the 'occupants' first, a pair of very merry and slightly wobbly Dubliners...

Before asking very nicely if I could then take a picture of James on his own.

I have a feeling James Joyce would have loved this moment, and of course I'm not far from Eccles Street and also the Writer's Museum which thankfully had a cafe and and a lunch stop.
Writing this now I'm beginning to feel this is starting to resemble my own version of Poldy's progress around Dublin, which says a great deal about how much there is of interest to see whilst also realising how far James Joyce made Leopold Bloom walk. I was only there for a total of thirty hours, and soaking in the bath or asleep for some of that, but I still have so much to tell you, we have the afternoon to do yet.

W.B.Yeats @ the National Library of Ireland

It was but a hop and skip along the Dublin streets from Trinity College to the National Library of Ireland in Kildare Street, I'm ahead of the crowds and had ear-marked the W.B.Yeats exhibition as another 'must visit' venue.
But Yeats and I have a pathetically poor track record after that pig's ear of an exam question which left me barely on speaking terms with him all those years ago, my fault entirely. I'd ignored him all through the Modern Literature course thanks to time limitations and a rather over-balanced leaning towards Hughes, Larkin and Plath, and so when I turned the paper over and saw they'd thrown in a Yeats for the unseen analysis, well more fool me for even attempting it.
It was very unseen, I'd never laid eyes on it before and I'll bet you all know that sinking feeling when you reach the point of no return... insufficient time to choose another question so you plough on clueless and inventing wildly through the morasse and end up feeling sorry for the examiner who's going to have to wade through this treacley mess of disordered thought to mark it.
So I walked into this grand and imposing building determined to make friends with W.B.Yeats, and it was about the easiest friendship I've ever made, because as I walked into that little room ahead of me, with its comfortable bench seating around the edge, beautifully evocative and changing screen images around the walls, the words and a recording of the poem resonating around, this is what gently assailed my ears...

read by Kathleen Watkins,

'... I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

How could anyone not love those words in that order and W.B.Yeats instantly and not a moment before time, enters the portals of the dovegreyreader personal poetic greats.
Being completely inquisitive about inner lives and the day to day-ness of writers, I love exhibitions like this, with collages

and library shelf mock-ups

and spectacles and locks of hair

and original manuscripts which transport me to that 'looking over the shoulder' position which feels so intimate, as if I'm watching someone write...

I was here much longer than I had intended but this wasn't a race around the city, I wanted time to soak it all up, so I sat down again in the little room and listened to all the available poems, allowing them to wash over me.
It will be hard to forget hearing W.B.Yeats reading The Lake Isle of Innisfree on this my first trip to Dublin. An elderly, slightly shaky yet venerable voice and a life I now knew a great deal more about, if you missed it when I linked the other day, you too can sit there and enjoy the moment with me.

If a library exhibition is so good then the next best thing has to be the library shop and the library's own series of Joyce studies on *special offer*, twenty-one slim volumes for the knock-down bargain price of 15 euros. Don't even ask me about the pain of indecision I suffered as I realised that I couldn't possibly carry all these around Dublin for the rest of the day, and so anguished over seven to be going on with.

One thing that has become very evident since Team Ulysses is that this book is staying with me. I think about little bits of it often, moments flit into my mind out of nowhere making me keen to read much more background and, I knew it would happen, even dip into a little of the academia that I have avoided. So I chose my seven and off to my next stop, a brief homage to Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde and onwards to the Writer's Museum.
Out in the lobby I'm distracted a while longer by a display of letters in response to a request sent by the library down the years to well-known figures asking for the name of their favourite poem.
William Trevor :: The Lady of Shallot, Seamus Heaney :: Cuculain Comforted,  Graham Norton in an eloquent and beautifully written letter :: Epic by Patrick Kavanagh.
So which would you chose?

Dublin Saturday

A hearty hotel breakfast, unlike anything I would ever manage at home, and I'm fuelled and off on my Dublin Saturday.
My guides from the Irish Tourist Board had very kindly put together some suggestions for me and will do the same for you if ever you find yourself in Dublin, but I kept wandering off-piste, diverted by so much to see in so little time.
I set off along the banks of the River Liffey in perfect walking weather, bright but chilly so no overheating today, heading for Trinity College and the Book of Kells, firstly because it's there and it's on my list of things that have to be seen just because, and secondly for all I'd heard about it, I actually knew very little.
The first thing any patchworker would notice walking into the gates of Trinity College is the wooden floor...

which also reminded me of the basalt of the Giant's Causeway and which is perhaps the intention.

Then, as always with these college entrance ways that belie the space beyond, your breath is slightly taken away with the size of that space and the architecture.

The Book of Kells the four gospels in Latin, exquisitely decorated by the monks of Iona sometime in the 9th century and lucky to have survived not only the Viking raids on the island which left sixty-eight monks dead, but also the scourge of Cromwell. The book was sent to Dublin for safe-keeping in 1653 and to Trinity College in 1661 and there it has stayed.


The exhibition itself a sort of progress towards a darkened inner sanctum where the book rests, and along the way a series of large illuminated slides which reveal the intricacies barely visible to the naked eye when you finally see it, all making it even more of a marvel.
It's the little facts I love...the 185 calf skins needed to make the vellum pages, the swan's quills and marten fur brushes, the minerals for the pigments, azurite, malachite, orpiment...
Orpiment?
What's that?
A rare arsenic based mineral I discover that yields the yellow pigment, highly unstable and liable to deteriorate into a powder, so where did they source that and how?
And how on earth could they see to create such fine detail?
If I'd bought the guide book I'd know these things but suffice unto the day, I have seen The Book of Kells and can now rest easy.
On the day of my visit the book open at Luke 4:1 The Temptation of Christ... Jesus autem plenas spiritum sancto and the text open at John 7: 31-44
The exhibition leads on into the Long Room of Trinity College Library, surely among the most magnificent libraries in the world with its 65 metre long gallery and 200,000 books.


Each alcove containing a pair of very enticing wooden ladders fixed to a sort of sliding rail system, a booklover's playground if ever I saw one.
A form of reverential space of awesome proportions.
And I've now seen the oldest know specimen of an Irish harp nestling in there too, made of oak and willow, thought to be fifteenth century; think Guiness and you'll know the shape of it.
As I left the crowds were starting to pour in and I realised I had been fortunate to get a glimpse of all this without any jostling, so keeping myself ahead of the game it was off to the National Library in Kildare Street to see the W.B.Yeats exhibition.

Dublin Culture Night 2010

I'm sorry to have to admit that I was a bit of a lightweight when it came to tackling last Friday's Dublin Culture Night head on when I'm sure the rest of you would have kept going until the small hours and managed the late night supper at Harry's Cafe and still been up with the lark on Saturday.
I'd done the PEN event in London the night before and was staying at the Penn Club (no connection) in Bloomsbury and right opposite my old nurse's home in Bedford Place.
For those that don't know of it, The Penn Club an ideal place to book a comfortable, clean and warm budget room and breakfast for overnight London stays. Except I hadn't slept a wink after the excitement of the day and a fear of oversleeping for my early flight, eventually deciding at 5am it made more sense to skip the breakfast and be awake and checked in at the airport than lying awake in Bloomsbury.
I managed to get from Bloomsbury, and how eerily familiar was it to walk those dark wet and deserted London streets to the tube at 6am, thence to the airport, then to Dublin to hotel and to lunch at The Winding Stair by 1pm and a meeting with Joseph O'Connor.
Time had been set aside for me to talk with Joseph about his new novel Ghost Light and all those other very inquisitive things that 'dovegreyreader asks...' likes to know, more of which soon. I did have to own up shamefacedly that I was new to his novels; honestly authors must hate it when people interviewing them say that but supposing he'd asked me what I thought of Redemption Falls or Inishowen, then the cat would have been out of the proverbial. Anyway Joseph was utterly charming and lovely and of course I now want to read everything, plus he signed my almost finished copy of Star of the Sea.
After lunch, and feeling the onset of creeping withdrawal symptoms connected to no sighting of a bookshop, I was more than happy to find one attached to the restaurant and an extremely good one it is too, and therein was my promised treat, a copy of the poetry of W.B.Yeats.
I now feel a whole Yeats post coming on having also been to the exhibition at the National Library of Ireland in Kildare Street while I was in the city, and which proved to be a complete joy thanks in large part to this. Click the top of the arrow and you can sit in that little room too and hear Yeats reading The Lake Isle of Innisfree and also take in the rest of the exhibition.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, that's for Saturday, it's still Friday.
Culture Night is becoming a national and now an annual late-September event across Ireland, and one which has grown from small beginnings, all in an effort to reclaim the Temple Bar area of Dublin from the copious hen and stag nights it had become renowned for, and all thanks to Mr O'Leary's cheap-as-chips flights into the city. Fortunately it's now cheaper than chips to go to Riga and Barcelona so the per-nuptial hens and stags have clucked and galloped in that direction, leaving Temple Bar to up its cultural game and turn around the negative publicity, which it has done with great and ever-increasing success.
I was introduced to the Minister for Arts & Culture who happened to pass by and looked set to have a grand time (as we now say) and I was just wallowing in the voices. I could listen to Dubliners talking all day, it really is an exquisite and beautifully expressive accent.
Everyone was busy getting ready for a fantastic night of free events, readings, exhibitions, music, street entertainers, singing and dancing so it was wonderful to stroll around amongst it all.

Something unusual around every corner

and then you look upwards, in a city you don't know and spot even more unusual sights.

So I'm afraid that was me sleep-walking back to the hotel by 8pm, about twenty minutes walk along the banks of the River Liffey when you're awake, I have no idea how long it took me whilst asleep on my feet, but most unusually a good night's sleep followed, a real rarity for me away from home, and all ready for the On Your Marks...Get Set... Dublin day I had planned for us on Saturday.

Dublin ...'twas grand.

You could be forgiven for thinking this is any old piano,

or that this is any old letterbox upon which I have laid my hand in homage...

but that's James Joyce's piano, and none other than the number 7 Eccles Street front door.
No longer to be found in Eccles Street and actually this is no ordinary front door either...  this is an M&S front door, because they now own it, but I found it eventually and not in the Food Hall.
So I've done the whole tourist thing and I'm sorry for making you walk quite so far because I'm not sure where I've left my feet either, they don't seem to belong to me today, though I do have to sing the praises of my new Mukluk FitFlop boots. Wherever they redistribute the weight around the soles of my feet, it's in the right places, like walking round with footduvets on, all making Dublin painless and magnificent.
Even the oft-maligned Ryanair was fine, nice fleet of smart planes that looked a lot more substantial than the OtherCheap flights I've done in airfix models with wobbly wings.
The flight home was delayed yesterday evening which had me in a bit of a panic about running out of book as I was nearing the end of Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor, and in trying to save enough to have to read on the plane I idled away some airport time trying to spend the very last bit of Euro coinage.
I can't tell you what on yet because it's a little gift for the Tinker and he'll read this before I see him.
I had foolishly pronounced some time ago that the next person to go to Euroland had to take the fifty euros of loose change collected from various trips previous, not realising it would be me or how much it weighed, and then for some reason I became quietly obssessed about not bringing any coins back with me.
I can now quickly apologise to the man in the Winding Stair bookshop where I bought the nice edition of Yeats's poetry and who is unlikely to run out of change for the forseeable future, the man on the till at the Book of Kells exhibition at Trinity College likewise, the taxi driver who got me to the lunch on time and the ticket seller  at the Famine Ship Museum who helped me to engineer a complex mental arithmetical double exchange of coins and notes at 4pm that left me with the lesser note and her with even more coins.

And I saw and did a whole lot more besides, Cultural Night, the National Photographic Archive exhibition 'Power & Privilege, The Big House in Ireland 1858-1922', the W.B. Yeats exhibition at the National Library of Ireland (extraordinarily powerful)  the James Joyce Centre, The Writer's Museum, Grafton Street, O'Connell Street, all of which I shall present for your delectation through this week.
And I even went and found this just so I could say Team Ulysses had been there.

My very sincere thanks to the Irish Tourist Board for their invitation and all the care and effort they had put into the trip, and yes I did get to sit and talk one-to-one with Joseph O'Connor in The Winding Stair restaurant and yes, the voice recorder was switched on, and yes he is wonderful to talk to, much more about that soon too.
Not forgetting the PEN event either, much to tell you about Thursday including afternoon tea with two authors, one of whom is on this year's Booker short list and the other who was there a few years ago, and all the lovely people I met that evening. Thank you to those of you who came, I could see you all smiling at me in the audience, it was lovely.
Can all this really be happening to me?
But it's back to reality and I quite thought I'd be getting a year older in Dublin airport because it's that day with the candles again, which seems to be coming around at warp-speed, but Bookhound trilled 'the song' halfway back down the M5, as midnight chimed.
Thank you for cards... you have very amazing memories. The Kayaker rang 'very early' this morning (we must be grateful even if half asleep which I was) and of course the Tinker rang too, but he knows that this is one of those days in the year when I miss my Mum the most, she loved birthdays, so this picture always seems to fit the day nicely.
I always like to think that gaze is fixed in my memory somewhere.

Dublin bound...

Hope you are all packed and ready to depart. I'm up at crack-of this morning after last night's PEN event (more of that soon) to get us to the airport on time.
I've only been to Ireland once before and that was with a gang of student nurse friends on a horse-drawn caravan holiday around Westport in County Mayo.
No, I don't know what I was thinking either, I'm not a lover of horses so it was a terrible ordeal that had me wishing myself back on night duty on the Infectious Diseases ward, but I blame Laura Ashley completely.
We'd all bought our long dresses for £6.30 from the shop in Sloane Street and nabbed those little short smocks that you wore over your loon pants (the jeans that with a fair wind behind the legs would have got you right across the Atlantic) and we were all desperate to get out of 1970's London and try all this out whilst gliding through real flowery meadows in the real countryside. It was a blessing that at least the horse had a brain and knew the way round and when to stop because none of us had the first clue. The horse also knew that its food was kept in a very horse-accessible box on the back of the wagon, so having scoffed a week's rations when we weren't looking on the first night, it had to live on slim pickings of grass for the rest of the week.
The countryside was indeed beautiful and I clearly remember the sight of Croagh Patrick with its pilgrim's path visible around every corner, but I also recall being consumed with worry that our starving nag would be skeletal by the time we got back to where we'd started and we'd be in awful trouble.
As for catching the thing to harness it up for the day's journey...
Anyway they let us out of the country, but I just have to think Ireland and, as well as caravans, in piles all the other imagery gathered hither and thither down the years; Dana singing All Kinds of Everything and lush green fields and poverty and misery and no potatoes, dissent and unrest and a general dissatisfaction with all things emanating from England, jolly good funerals and fantastic wakes, McGahern and Trevor, a bit of horse rustling, some Flatley River Dancing, shilelaghs, shamrocks, Guinness and the Liffey, Toibin and Sebastian Barry, to say nothing of all those recently acquired layers of Bloom and Molly and more funerals and fried kidneys.
Ridiculous muddle, it's time to sort it all out and see for myself and I'm very excited to get the chance to do so.
So I'm on my way to Dublin and the City of Literature events today and will hopefully be meeting and doing dovegreyreader asks... with Joseph O'Connor at lunchtime (RyanAir willing etc... please say a novena or whatever works best for you on my behalf) going to various events at Culture Night tonight and a day in an around the city tomorrow.
OK everyone, I have a flag on stick here, please don't lose sight of it.

Mass Observation :: First Year's Work 1937-1938

I hadn't given much thought to Faber Finds when they first emerged two years ago.
This is Faber's print on demand service for hundreds of their out-of-print titles, each with an automatically generated cover design and very small print runs. Click on the tag clouds and up come some real forgotten heroes, here's Essays & Prose. The Haunted Study by Peter Keating a book I still don't own because each time I bought it in a charity shop for 50p I could never resist then selling it on Amazon Marketplace where it regularly used to fetch £30.
Nor had I paid that much attention to the squiggles on the cover until I read this about the design process, which does indeed seem quite clever, but may perhaps have passed me by had I not done some digging around.
Reading back through the publicity at the time, there seems to have been some concern about whether this print-on-demand model would sell without a heavy presence on the bookshop shelves, and I have no idea whether it has done or not, but I suspect it may come into its own in the digital market. Though I know precious little about all this, an idle Amazon wander through the Faber Finds titles I have been reading suggests they are readily available for the new WiFi Kindle.
Don't let me even glimpse that gizmo. Moan and groan about e readers as plenty of people might, but I love my Sony e reader and the thought of a WiFi version...mmmm.

So I had the Faber Finds stocklist and chose a few titles from the hundreds available and then spent several hours rooted to the reading chair when they arrived. I had chosen a selection of books by Edward Thomas as I'm thinking I may focus on the War Poets for my Remembrance Reading this November, and I had always wanted to read Corduroy by Adrian Bell. I will have much to say about these soon but especially Corduroy, a book that has really touched my heart and readily found itself a comfortable spot on the Roger Deakin shelf.
The covers are minimalist, some may even say uninteresting, but then we are used to minimalist from Faber and in fact a close look reveals a unique sort of intricacy, so perhaps this is about a different style of book for a different generation of readers, and what an entertaining time I've had with a couple of my choices about Mass Observation.
Mass Observation was established on February 12th 1937, when a group of thirty people from a range of backgrounds agreed 'to set down plainly all that happened to them on that day.' At about the same time six observers of a different kind moved to live in a working-class quarter of a Lancashire cotton town; having given up their own jobs they would watch everyone else doing theirs and so the development of this massive sociological recording project began.
I'd heard of Mass Observation but didn't know too much about it, but having seen it in action in the Alan Bennett play Enjoy recently, Mass Observation - First Year's Work 1937-1938, an appraisal of that first year, has been a fascinating insight, not least because of the criticism the project garnered in the press at the time.
The New Statesman and Nation which had helped publicise the project turned on its heels and ran as time went on, becoming increasingly critical and hostile,

'finds it hard to imagine anything dottier'

The Church Times handed down their rather condescending verdict,

'Those who 'observe' will not generally be professional writers. either authors or journalists, but they will nevertheless, belong to the minority of the population which is articulate...'

Meanwhile a group called the intellectuals were openly hostile, feeling that Mass Observation

'is threatening their monopoly on portraying in various media, the human mind and body, human behaviour and feeling.'

To which Mass Observation responded,

'It is difficult to see how we can fail to annoy intellectuals until they realise that we are not doing their job at all... we venture to think that we shall be doing everyone a service by quite incidentally clarifying some of the issues between art, realism, real people, reality, real observation, and realist art.'

With notions of the 'observer as subjective camera' it was like a plus-ca-change-deja-vu moment all perhaps redolent of the old blogger versus critic debate, and doubtless more of the same up for debate at the PEN event this evening, but what a rich and fascinating source of information Mass Observation has proved to be in the years since and how many books has it spawned?
How far have we got with Nella Housewife 49 now?
Nella At War? Nella At Peace?
And who knows what a rich source the blogs may be in years to come for that access to the voice of the people. 'Mass Observation is concerned with an ordinary-eye view', and I was reminded of why everyone, bloggers and critics alike have something to offer in this world of books.
But perhaps it's also wise to remember that not everyone embraces the internet.
An Internet-Less Friend called in the other day, the one whose garden I raided for the Port Eliot Flower Show installation, and who had been thrilled to see us then get a mention in the Daily Telegraph which she'd kept for me. ILF still relies completely on the review pages and the radio for all her book recommends and she looked at me quite blankly when I said the word 'blog' and even more bemused when I tried to explain what it was, but she did leave very happily with a big box full of book recommends from me, all by writers she'd never heard of.

Touching base...

What day is it?

I'm in a blurry whirlwind of transit, the work conferencing is done and I'm doing a quick turn around at home via the washing machine before setting off to London tomorrow, and the PEN event which I'm really looking forward to and hope to meet some of you there.

Meanwhile transit reading has consisted of much more of A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, and a bit of Hypothermia, the latest Reykjavik murder mystery from Arnaldur Indridason, plus a dip into Dubliners by James Joyce just to start capturing the mood.
Hope you are all packed and ready for the off.

Ghost Light ~ Joseph O'Connor

'Ghost light. An ancient superstition among the people of the stage. One lamp must always be left burning when the theatre is dark, so the ghosts can perform their own plays.'

I didn't know that, can the thespians out there confirm?
Fact, fable or superstition it matters not because it is the most perfect analogy for this book.
With a trip to the fair city in the offing it seemed right and proper to head to Ireland with some reading too and having conquered Ulysses (sorry, did I mention that before?) I feel I have an affinity with all things Dublin, a strange if embryonic understanding of a city I knew virtually nothing about.
There is a chance I may meet Joseph O'Connor so how embarrassing would that be as I mumble that I haven't actually read any of his books, and actually having now read Ghost Light, how stupid would that have been too.

Dublin 1907, a city of whispered rumours, 'the shimmers of whispers' and young actress Molly Allgood falls in love with the playwright John Synge, terminally ill with Hodgkin's disease from which he died in 1909.
The blurb has nabbed all the best lines before me but he is "a troubled genius, a poet of fiery language and tempestuous passions" and a man I knew little about, she a girl of "the inner-city tenements, dreaming of stardom in America."
There are of course essential caveats to reading a fictional representation of real lives, I don't often enjoy them this much, so I was grateful that Joseph O'Connor owned up to those in his afterword... events not as depicted... most events didn't happen, and in his own words,

'Certain biographers will want to beat me with a turf shovel.'

I've struggled in the past with books like this that don't offer those provisos, so this reader won't be beating Joseph with a turf shovel should she find herself in proximity.
John Synge emotionally crippled by a domineering mother

'roasted on the flames of her widowhood...'

nursing a wistfulness and fear of happiness that Joseph O'Connor unravels as John's doomed love affair with Molly is played out in the elderly Molly's mind, many years later and under the influence of a considerable degree of ill-health and the demon drink.
Molly has been booked to do a radio play at the BBC and it as an old woman that she traverses Bloomsbury, making her way towards Portland Place and meditating, often in the second person narrative, about her life and loves. There are glimpses of excruciating poignancy delicately balanced to offer moments of really breathtaking sadness, deeply perceptive but never over-wrought, as events meander at will in Molly's mind from Russell Square, to Dublin to America, the BBC and back again.

'You are the daughter of a junkshop, a child of rag and bone, raised amid the tat no one wanted anymore, the bric-a-brac and clutter, the ugly and the expendable, but give the junk a little rub and you'll see your reflection. A bit of spit and polish works wonders.'

Latter day London is cold and bleak which all creates the perfect setting for the sense of melancholy that permeates Ghost Light as Molly considers her lively and gregarious past life on the stage from this solitude of the present. Stubborn and willful to the last 

'She is the kind of woman who persists in the face of hard evidence. It has caused her much grief, this trait.'

Molly's slow subsidence (I can think of no other word to describe it) towards her death is among the most moving I have read.
I've sat alongside many dying people and consider it a privilege, two in particular who I loved dearly, and always I am struck by the increasing transparency of that luminously fine veil between life and death as the moment approaches. To capture that ethereal sensation in the written word, the feeling that I always find it so hard to describe I don't even try, is a feat that Joseph O'Connor accomplishes deftly and with pinpoint accuracy here. One that had me stretching out the last remaining pages of the book over several days because I didn't want to lose that sense of closeness to Molly, alone in the book perhaps but with every reader sitting alongside her stroking her hand.
It's a book that, true to its title and the meaning of ghost light, has haunted me in the nicest possible way since I finished it, a vision of Molly shuffling across Russell Square suddenly flits into my mind, I see her walking into the bookshop expecting to see an old friend who will help her out of a financial fix...
John Synge's last remaining letter to her in her hand
Or sitting with the executor of Synge's will as she hears what is left her...
Joseph O'Connor's self-acknowledged  allusions to the Joycean style of Ulysses would have passed me by a year ago, not this time, I spotted them and revelled in them. That book has opened some amazing literary doors until now firmly closed.
So, for me Ghost Light has been a beautiful read and one that leaves me wondering quite why it failed to make this year's Booker long list, oh well ours is not to reason why etc, let's leave the last word to the priest Molly heard as a child,

'...grace was a gathering of candles waiting to be lit by the sinner... God, providence, the balm in Gilead - they need to be met halfway.'

Perfect.

Happy Birthday to...

It's one of those three annual Embarrass a Child days so please excuse the indulgence while Family Dovegrey wish a very Happy Birthday to the Gamekeeper, surely not twenty-five years ago today that I gave birth to this little chap, all 8lbs 6ozs of him.
Third baby in four years so I had to be prised out of Tavistock Maternity Home after the usual ten day stay; this one spent wondering why I had so few visitors. In fact I had loads but everyone said I was always asleep so they just crept off again.
I love this picture taken at first meeting... can't you just see what mischief the pair of them are plotting for this little invader. A matter of days before the event, that little Kayaker there, aged two and a half, had found himself a ladder and climbed onto the shed roof (because it was there) and no amount of bribery would persuade him down. Being too large to climb the ladder myself I had to ring Bookhound at work to come home and deal with.

Meanwhile, as if this week wasn't hectic enough, I'm off to a hotel up country today for two days of intense, work-related conferencing, so if I am tardy in comments that will explain it and many thanks to Fran for the Celtic blessing in comments yesterday, I shall need the wind in my sails this week:-)

Travelling...

I hope you're up for this because we have a very busy schedule this week and next, that's me and all of thee, because I do take you along to these things whether you like it or not.
Firstly the Everyone's A Critic event at PEN  in London to look forward to ...and my thanks to everyone who's emailed to say they will be there, I think we'll at least fill a bit of a row with dovegreyreaders and please come and say hello.
Then I hope you've all got your passports and Euros sorted, because hot on the heels of that and hardly time to do the washing before we are heading off somewhere very exciting indeed.
Now things like this don't happen to me very often, but on the strength of the Team Ulysses endeavours, the Irish Tourist Board have very kindly invited me to Dublin next weekend to see the sights, meet a few authors and generally join in the weekend's celebrations for Dublin's UNESCO City of Literature status.
I know I could hardly believe it either, but it's really happening.
The flights are booked and I'm taking my camera and all of you along of course and we will be having ourselves one heck of a whistle-stop good time. I will of course be doing some bookshops I hope and my plan is to buy a 'nice' copy of Ulysses if I can find one and decent edition of the poetry of W.B.Yeats if I can find one of those too.
I met a delightful Irish lady at an Open University Summer School years ago who revered Yeats and assured me, in her gentle Irish lilt, that I absolutely must make his poetic acquaintance; something which done but very half-heartedly since the final exam paper that year contained one of Yeats's poems for analysis and I made a right pig's ear of it. I've had nightmares about it ever since.
Expect pictures of everything James Joyceian, Sandymount and Martello Tower-like and the rest once I get back, and then as if that wasn't enough excitement for at least a year, the following week I am finally going to meet Adele Geras.
Adele has been visiting dovegreyreader scribbles since its infancy and so when she mentioned that she would be at a literary festival in North Devon it was too good a meet up to miss.
So luggage ready and labelled for Thursday morning everyone, we're off on a big adventure.
And I've been doing a bit of Irish reading too so expect some of that to get us in the mood this week... as if we didn't know it, there really is something quite unique and special about it all.

Theodora ~ Stella Duffy

I've read and shared thoughts on a several of Stella Duffy's novels here before, including State of Happiness, The Room of Lost Things and Stella very kindly answered the dovegreyreader asks... questions too, so it's clear I'm a fan and a new novel from Stella always a treat, so when a proof copy of Theodora arrived months ago I was all set to jump right in and read that minute.
The first few chapters confirmed I was going to enjoy this...
Then I decided to read nearer publication date in June...
Then summer happened....
And only now when the dust has settled, and the book's supposed moment in the spotlight has been and gone, have I finally settled down to read it.
It must be the publicist's worst nightmare, coping with this supposed tiny window that a book has around publication date, that merest blink of an eye in which to capitalise on reader interest, because we're all apparently fickle in our borrowing or buying and hurrying to rush onto the next best thing.
All in good time I say, us readers is not so green as we is cabbage looking as we says down y'ere.
Theodora is Stella Duffy's first historical novel and issued with a caveat from the author concerning veracity and historical accuracy, frequently sacrificed for 'plot or pace or character' and making no claims to be 'the one true story - just a story.'
I was fine with that, if it's long enough ago then all's fair in truth and fiction, more recent events squeezed into a novel bother me more for some reason. Historical liberties could wash right over me, any semblance of accuracy would pass my scant knowledge of sixth-century Constantinople by. In fact I was hard pushed to think of a single thing I may have known about Constantinople beyond the fact it's now Istanbul, even less about the holy desert retreats of Alexandria, others among you doubtless wiser. So I read  this dazzling story with complete enjoyment... and I think it is sometimes worth remembering that a good story is actually what many of us want from a novel now and again.

The young Theodora, who did exist and did rise from nothing to become the most powerful woman in Byazantine Rome when she married the Emperor Justinian, starts life as the tumbling, dancing daughter of the late chief keeper of the bears, Acacius, recently mauled to death by one of his animals. Thrown into poverty and seemingly at the mercy of the state, Theodora's mother Hypatia and her sisters must beg for charity, and the five year old Theodora soon learns that her likely profession once of age (sadly about twelve) will indeed be that of a whore. Meanwhile she must succumb to the brutal discipline of Menander the eunuch who trains the girls in the stage entertainments they provide each evening for the wealthy patrons.
At this point I think I should put you through Theodora's paces because there is a moment very early in the book, when Menander does just this as a form of punishment but the thought of having you all there in contortions and putting your backs out is not a good one, so I won't.
Theodora will be faced with daunting times and many challenges in a world created by Stella Duffy that seemingly acknowledged the existence of women for one purpose only, but ever the actress Theodora can be whatever she needs to be, morph into any role required, as she attempts to forge a life for herself in a world riven by the factions of an established but diverse Christian church. Feisty, intelligent and ambitious Theodora never loses sight of that independent fighting spirit, and a moment of real shock for me at one point in the novel when her age is revealed... so much had happened I felt she should at least be knocking forty, not a mere twenty-something.
This is a novel brimming with a real circus troupe of characters who most certainly leap off the page as you read, the colourful dwarf Sophia who holds all the trump cards, the duplicitous friend, Chrysomallo, the ambitious Hecebolus who whisks Theodora off into the sunset as his mistress ...I just knew no good could possibly come of someone with a name like a medical condition.
I wasn't wrong and the ever-savvy Theodora knew it too.

'She'd seen far too many other women fall from grace through their dependence on what had once been kind.'

So a hugely enjoyable book; doubtless hours, weeks and months of possibly dry and dusty historical research lived through by Stella Duffy on our behalf in order to grasp the finely-tuned nuances of the era, and yet that research resting lightly on the whole whilst giving sufficient depth to make this a fascinating window on the times and in particular the lives of the women who lived through them.
All injected with Stella's customary passion and colour to bring it to life... and I think I could hear her wonderful laugh in there once or twice too.

The Tour of Britain Tavistock style

Never in the depths of living memory has a town been so invaded by lycra.

So we set off into town to wave our Devon flags and help the Tour of Britain on its way, trust someone else to get in on the act... and look, who's that standing in front of him?

We seem to be meeting Sir Francis Drake everywhere we go at the moment and this being dear old Devon everyone had a go at the bike thing,

Even the Vicar joined in

while the real boys looked on slightly bemused.... but this is Tavistock we said... we has our ways of doing these things, you'm get your turn drekkly

which they did

and then they were gone, on their way to Glastonbury.
But hats off to the Town Council and Tour of Britain for making a community event of this, just imagine what we'd do if they gave us something Olympic 2012 to celebrate. But meanwhile we'd like a free Seth Lakeman concert in the Square every year please... and I didn't mention fabulous closing act Mad Dog McCrea, folk rock band extraordinaire and the Rock & Roll Outlaws.
Thanks lads, the ears are still popping.

Seth Lakeman plays Tavi...

Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!

My feet are killing me and I'm as deaf as a post, but Seth Lakeman's set at the free Tavy Tour Party was superb. Lots of old favourites and some from the new album Hearts and Minds including the title track.

If you know Seth's music then let me tell you, you will never hear a better rendition of the legendary Kitty Jay than we all heard tonight.

And there was screaming and moshing and everything, we feel quite grown up after a night rocking in the Square.
Up early in the morning to go and watch a load of men in lycra set off on the next leg of the Tour of Britain Cycle Race, Tavistock to Glastonbury... taking in high Dartmoor, blimey, it seems far enough in the car.

Hotel Endsleigh Dinner

I am so far behind with Endsleigh Salon updates it hurts but it's that Tuesday again, this evening's theme The Deep South and my money's on at least one reading of Gone With the Wind... well I hope so because I haven't read it since I was sixteen and I'd love to mull it all over again without all the teenage angst getting in the way.
Except, it's all a bit of a clash tonight because not only do we have choir practice, but great excitement because the Tour of Britain cycle race is passing through Tavistock overnight, so the roads are closed and we all have free tickets for the concert in the Square. Local lad done good, Seth Lakeman will be playing and as I am a huge fan and have been playing the latest CD Hearts & Minds ad nauseum we have decided us aging rockers could be tempted to go to a gig.
A few weeks ago Bookhound and I were invited to another gig, a dinner at the hotel with guest speaker, Rachel Trethewey author of the Mistress of the Arts, the book about Georgina, the sixth Duchess of Bedford. Rachel's book the reason we all know locally that years ago it took someone from the village three days to plump up all the feather mattresses when the Bedfords were planning a local sojourn in their holiday cottage. It's a wonderful book and one that we've all read and enjoyed.
Fascinating then to hear the background to the writing of the book, the countless phone calls around the museums to check the existence of letters from Georgina which unearthed some really unexpected gems, including the love poetry of one ardent admirer of the Duchess (one of many it seems).
Lord Holland fired with the sort of imagination you'd want an admirer to possess when he manages to capitalise on the shortage of words to rhyme with Duchess, and so settles frequently on 'crutches'.
The research proved an invaluable insight into Regency life with marriage for dynastic reasons, for life and for the heir and the spare, but infidelity rife and accepted practice.
Incidentally, for our Christmas gathering this year the Endsleigh Salon plan a reading of a play.
We've been threatening to do it since we started, so when I was visiting Faber (& Faber) on a recent London trip I asked if they could suggest one that would have plenty of parts and plenty of laughs. Faber have done us proud because a few weeks later a dozen copies of The Madness of George III  by Alan Bennett arrived. Completely contemporaneous to the venue and who knows, probably the subject of much discussion amongst Georgina's houseparty guests as they sat in that same salon room that we do. Anyway our imaginations are fired and running away with us, the evening likely to be hilarious, especially as we will doubtless be dressing accordingly and taking along one prop each (not much room for a complete set)
In the end, after fruitless trips to Ireland and the archives of the Abercorn family, into which Georgina's daughter had married, it was the Devon Records Office that produced the research jewels for Rachel Trethewey, an archive of every bill and receipt for monies paid out by the Bedfords in the construction of Endsleigh (incidentally 200 years last Sunday since the laying of the foundation stone) In total £120,000, the equivalent of £4 million today.
Within those records fascinating details...
Georgina joined the Tavistock Subscription Library
Her favourite scent was Esprit de Rose
She regularly bathed in asses milk
But all was not lost on the research trip to Baron's Court in Ireland, the seat of the Abercorn family. Here were revealed the sketches by Edwin Landseer, almost certainly Georgina's lover (yes, another one) and whilst poetry may not have been Edwin's bag, art was and the sketches revealed an intimate, tender and sensuous evocation of their love, much like a photo album. The drawings seemed as fresh as the day they had been drawn and in the words of Rachel Trethewy, the 'distance between the past and the present evaporated'.
Georgina, exiled from Endsleigh by the family after the death of the 6th Duke, died in Nice in 1853, sadly a trip to Nice could not locate her grave.
So a fine time was had by about sixty diners, plenty of interesting questions and it was good to chat to Rachel again after meeting up at Dartington earlier this year too, and I finally managed to get my copy of the book signed.
Then time for home...but we had parked in the rather more distant and uphill, woodland car park...in daylight.
By now pitch dark the hotel came to our rescue with a small lantern which helped a little once Bookhound realised he was holding it back to front and illuminating the path behind us.
But still velvet darkness and a deathly hush as we inched our way  up the path, trying to remember if there had been a fifty foot drop to one side or not, and felt our way around the carriages until we thought we'd found ours, which we did eventually.
Not hard to imagine ourselves back 200 years at all.

Stoner ~ John Williams

You could be forgiven for forgetting that Stoner by John Williams was the book I bought at the LRB Bookshop on a day trip to the metropolis recently, only to arrive home and find that another copy had arrived from Amazon that I had completely forgotten I had ordered. Drat the iTouch app that makes book buying so quick and simple it's scarily forgotten in nano-seconds.
So with two copies I made the choice to keep the rather nice New York Review of Books edition just to see if I could get my NYRB collection within a mile of all those 'Man Bloggers' who love them so much, and I would give the Vintage edition as a gift. Which I did to Karen of Cornflower when we met, and I'm now quite pleased I did because I know it's been read and passed on to a friend of Karen's as requested.  In fact a feline-like commenter here who has a birthday today and who reads and haunts these parts and my hope is that the gift copy hasn't fallen apart in his paws as my copy has.
As I turned over to p100, *pop* out flew the next eight pages. I know there are worse things in life to fret over but I do find that quite disconcerting when it happens, it does something odd to the reading moment let alone the thought of the £11.99 you've paid for a paperback.

But what of Stoner?
Expectations run high when John McGahern claims as follows in a recommend I came across while browsing my copies of The Reader recently (incidentally a journal that continues in the ascendant, if you love books, you'll love The Reader) and had delved as far back as Issue 5 Autumn 1999

'Stoner is...the best novel I know set in a university. Williams writes convincingly of that most difficult thing to write about, the experience of literature, and the experience of teaching literature...Among the subjects it touches are conflict (sexual and academic), perversion, careerism, idealism, faitfulness, love and death. The plot creaks a little here and there, but it does not matter. The triumph is in the purity and truth of its language.'

We might as well all go home now with that succinct and spot on encapsulation of the book.
So much written about Stoner around the LitBlogs, hither, thither and yonder  where the book has been embraced with a tradition of love and fealty that I'm hardly likely to disrupt. Except it did subvert my expectations by being a quietly combustible page-turner, unlike Crossing To Safety by Wallace Stegner, the slow-burn read that, prior to opening this, had lasted me for weeks.
I had to stop myself reading Stoner too fast, it warrants careful deliberation but occasionally demanded some furious page-turning as Desperate of Devon couldn't wait to know how this was going to pan out.
For those who know little or nothing of the book, Stoner is an account of the life of William Stoner set in that period bridging both wars that provide such fertile fictional ground.
Stoner a quietly, introspective, single-minded young man, one on a seemingly very even keel, prone to no extremes, apparently incapable of excitement, lacking in social skills or confidence but somehow content in his shoes. In many ways an oddly gentle, unassuming product of his upbringing given its roots in poverty and hard manual labour on the family farm at Booneville, Missouri.

'It was a lonely household, of which he was on only child, and it was bound together by the necessity of its toil.'

It was too soon in the book for me to appreciate quite how much William Stoner must have owed these qualities to his poverty-stricken, hard-working parents, but much was to become apparent as I read on.  Reflecting back on the book as I write, I now realise that very early on it became clear to me that John Williams had that writerly skill I have long admired since first discovering George Eliot's ability to do it... a writer who can have me scurrying to judgement and then gently twist things around and make me see things differently.
John Williams was to do this many times over before I reached the end of the book, but masterly writing indeed if you have me biting my lip by the end of chapter two.
The forty mile journey to Columbia University might well have been akin to crossing the continent and William Stoner's ambitions towards academia hardly written in the stars, with an attitude to lessons much akin to the enforced labour of his chores on the farm. It is his parents' unexpected offer of the chance to study agriculture for four years at Columbia that will give their son the opportunities they lacked, but with the unspoken agreement that he will come back to the farm with that knowledge and carry on as before.
They hadn't bargained for the fact their son would be far more enamored by literature.
But that Shakespeare Sonnet 73, used by his tutor to humiliate William Stoner in an early tutorial, surely a portent of things to come

That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon these boughs which shake against the cold
Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west...

The sonnet that examines those fears of ageing and dying and with its final two lines urging us cherish it while we can

'This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.'

When his tutor asks him dryly,

'Mr Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years Mr Stoner; do you hear him?'

There is little doubt that Mr Shakespeare has indeed spoken and that William Stoner has been privy to a personal revelation in that classroom that will affect him for the rest of his life.
The closeted insularity of the collegiate world, for all its privileges, somehow mirroring the isolated life that Stoner had been used to, and once settled it's clear this will become his world and his life. Life will have to come to him, Stoner is unlikely to go looking for it and when love does appear... though what does this man know of love I asked myself (judging again, in the end her knows plenty as John Williams slowly reveals), it is laden with a sense of foreboding beautifully described in this vision of Edith on the day of their marriage.

'In her white dress she was like a cold light coming into the room...'

How few words were needed to tell me what frozen wastes may lay ahead.
John McGahern's perceptive introduction likens Edith to the women portrayed by Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams et al but I instantly thought of another writer.
Edith's sheltered, privileged life lived 'like a low hum' could easily have existed on the edges of the latter-day Edith Wharton milieu. Not quite wealthy enough to be the elite, but the Bostwicks, a St Louis banking family to whom money mattered first and foremost (I'd have loved a little Lindbergh reference to fly in somewhere) and clearly the 1929 stock market crash was approaching. Edith in some respects discreetly and surprisingly (more judgements dispelled) armed with all the capabilities of Wharton's femme fatale from The Custom of the Country, Undine Spragg, though with little courage or scope to use them to the full. Though John Williams makes it impossible to warm to her, there is something utterly tragic about Edith's life too.
There will be moments of joy for Stoner, this is life after all, consistently and completely miserable doesn't make for good reading; moments when he is afforded a glimpse of pure happiness, the what-might-have-been tantalisingly just beyond his grasp leaving a life over-arched by a wistful melancholia, yet hard to imagine a different course for a man so beset by his own inadequacies.

'He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.'

And as John Williams makes clear in interviews about the book, Stoner was a man doing what he wanted to do and I would add it could be argued selfishly so. The same interview reveals something more as Williams complains about the changes in the teaching of literature and the attitude to the text ,

'as if a novel or poem is something to be studied and understood rather than experienced....to read without joy is stupid.'

For all its seeming sadness there is something very joyful about reading this book, with a fulfilled sense of completeness to the ending that I won't dwell on, but to be left with that sensation that you've just read a brilliant book, Stoner an experience to be treasured.

A load more hot air...

The one thing I didn't realise from all those years of entering the Village Show and reclaiming our entries at 5.30pm and then going home, was that people (i.e. the committee) have to stay behind and clear it all up until about 7pm.
And then have to think what to do with things like the unclaimed rabbit-shaped jelly.
But it meant that I did catch the sight of this about to land in the field right next to the lane as I drove home. I pulled into the gateway and took this picture just as the balloon changed its mind, picked up height again and soared onwards and upwards.

And someone else who might need a little lift after this week... Offspringette, who has fractured her wrist (scaphoid) after a tumble.
I had been saying helpful things like
'Can you wiggle your fingers?' and 'Press on your anatomical snuff-box to check your scaphoid' for about a week and heard no screams, plus she came over and managed to pick 4lbs of blackberries with no sign of a grimace so I said it was probably just bruised.
Wrong....guilt-laden mother.
You'd think I'd have been erring on the side of caution after almost killing the electrician.
So we spent a happy day together down in the fracture clinic this week while they fitted a very fetching blue cast to her right hand and arm,(thankfully she's a southpaw) which then had to come off (the cast not her arm) during a midnight trip to casualty on the same day thanks to fingers about the size of a bunch of bananas and of a hue to match the plaster.
She now has a very pretty purple cast for the next 6 weeks and will be co-ordinating her wardrobe to match.

How to Build an Extension to Your Home :: Part 4

So when you build an extension to your home there are very strict rules about your cavities.
This is the gap between the inner blocks and the outer blocks which has to contain sheets of insulation and then a bit of space and absolutely no detritus.
The building inspector (Lucy) has been to check Bookhound's cavities and declared them quite the nicest and cleanest she had seen that day, in fact better than the nasty, messy cavities of the professional builder she had just been to inspect.
There was much rejoicing chez dovegrey.
Then ye on the seventh day he rested and Bookhound decided to have a break from building and do a week of digging instead, because your extension also needs its services. So it was time to bring back the digger on hire (cue rain) and sort the water supply, the drains and the electric cable all of which resembled an enormous web of tangled Fair Isle knitting, just using pipes instead of wool.
The electrician (known as the sparky) came to add an extra few feet to the electric cable and that was almost very exciting to the tune of an ambulance but thankfully disaster was averted.
I, the great uninformed indoors, declared in a loud and irritated voice that the water had gone off.... something often trips out the electric pump that brings the water up from the bore-hole. So I summoned the Gamekeeper (occasionally useful for his height) to switch it back on again on the main circuit board, not realising that the electrician was outside and had switched it off, and was at that moment holding the live end of the main cable from the National Grid.
It was one of those slow motion, frame by frame, frozen moments in time...
... the Gamekeeper reaching up with his hand on the switch about to flip the electricity on
... Bookhound running (really running, not just pretending) in the back door screaming DON'T TOUCH IT
... the Gamekeeper, despite being a good 3ft taller these days, instantly transported back to his childhood and fortunately obeying his father's edict (it wasn't ever thus)
... and the electrician thankfully living to see another day another dollar.
We took an executive decision not to tell the sparky (getting the lingo here) what had happened because we'd like him to want to come back.
But we all paled silently and visibly at what might have been and had to sit down for a minute.
So after several days of what Bookhound described as playing with very big bits of Meccano, miles of drains and pipes and cable have been joined together and laid, bedded in pea gravel and all buried safely back underground. It's like the London Underground underneath there.

Bookhound has now had his drains inspected by Lucy (who seems to live here at the moment) declaring them the prettiest network of drains she had ever seen and there was yet more rejoicing chez dovegrey.
The next thing we have to think about is windows but I think that might be enough excitement for now.
Oh yes, and today's our 34th wedding anniversary so it's another day of rest before he gets back to his project, and yes he still says it...he would have got less for murder.
And so would I.

and the winners are...

Our Susan has chosen the winning numbers for the signed prize draw copies of  her latest ghost story The Small Hand and she has very kindly added in an extra copy as there were so many entries, so the four lucky winners are...

6 - Chris

22 - Pat

42 - Ann P

70 - Pia

As always, check it's really you against your number in the comments here, send your address to me at dovegreyreader at gmail dot com and Susan will kindly post the book to you direct, if there is a brief delay don't be alarmed, it will be with you eventually.

Ready, Steady, Tolstoy.

It's today, Tolstoy's 182nd birthday and we're off on our year-long shared read of Tolstoy's War & Peace and I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to this.
I'm hoping everyone has made friends with a copy of the book which is to their liking, I'm already bonded with mine and can see it will, like Ulysses last year, become a permanent feature around the house. I love the thought that I'll be reading one book into the autumn, over Christmas, through the depths of winter, through those doldrums of early New Year and on into spring and another summer and you'll all be reading too. As we say farewell to the swallows any day now I'll still be reading War and Peace when they come back.
The first thing to say is this read is primarily for pleasure and fun so don't feel under any pressure if you fall behind or slip off the back of the troika, there will be plenty of encouragement and flag-waving in comments I'm sure.
Nor is this an in-depth academic or literary study though I feel sure we will pick up plenty of nuances and knowledge along the way, and I am so delighted that Helen Rappaport will be alongside us. With the incredible depth of her Russian knowledge Helen's company (when she has time) will be a real privilege, I suspect we are in for a unique treat as well as getting some of those questions answered along the way...though I am also mindful that Helen is in mid-flow with her forthcoming book on the death of Prince Albert so we will just be very happy to see her when ever she can stop by.
Everyone may have their own method here, the chapter-a-day readers (there are 366 chapters) will be cantering along at their own pace, others may gallop ahead, whilst the schedule I plan to read takes in a neat trot of about a hundred or so pages a month and fits comfortably with Tolstoy's natural breaks in the book. So for this next month I will be reading the twenty-five chapters of Book One - Part One which takes me to p118 in my edition, gathering back here for comments on October 9th and with a new post on the 9th of every month thereafter.
And you can always add comments on this post through the month too.
All the posts will be tagged under the Team Tolstoy permalink  also filed in the margins over here >>>> along with a few other helpful (hopefully) additions.
The edition I read some years ago contained a life-saving bookmark with the names of the main characters, other prominent characters and historical figures which I laminated and was rarely parted from as I read. For my sins I have typed that up as an aide memoire and my thanks to Ruth who has helpfully formatted it into two sides of a customized Team Tolstoy bookmark which you can also print off and make your own.
I've also invested £8.99 in what feels like a bit of a bargain, the complete BBC series of War and Peace starring Antony Hopkins on DVD from Amazon, but with Dutch sub-titles. Now for once I have believed those on Amazon who say this is a steal because apparently all you do is change the language to English and switch off the sub-titles and you are left with the original version, all 900 minutes of it. It will almost certainly involve a panic phone call to a child asking how to sort this but currently I'm faintly optimistic.
Finally,my thanks to Helen Rappaport who has kindly given us the following beginners tips for success in coping with the Russian names, this will also be stored as file over in Team Tolstoy HQ >>>>

First principle to remember is that in Tsarist Russia  particularly in the Napoleonic period, French was the primary language at court. Many aristos spoke it better than their native Russian. They therefore often used Frenchified forms of their first names - this prevailed right up to the Revolution with e.g. Grand Duchess Mariya the tsar’s third daughter being called ‘Marie’ by the family. 

Second principle is that the Russian naming system uses patronymics: -ovich and -evich are the most common ending for males; -evna for females. These are the bugbears for most non-Russian speakers who have to cope with tripartite names. I would suggest ignore them and think of the characters in terms merely of their first and second names. Having said that though in polite conversation Russians then, as now, never ever address each other by Christian name only but always by first name + patronymic - this is the real bind in all Russian novels!  

Here are the most regularly occurring names in the story with both the French form, when used, and the Russian and its most common diminutive/affectionate forms (though some first names have as many as 20 variants!)

Pierre Bezukhov (real  Russian name Petr) don’t think anyone calls him anything other than Pierre but his real Russian name is Petr Kirillovich. The most common diminutives of the name Petr, in case they occur elsewhere in the novel are: Petya, Petrush(k)a, Petyusha  (and many more forms but a lot of these are colloquial/peasant usage)

Nikolai:  Kolya, Kolyusha,  Nikasha, Nikolka  ( as per Petr I could go on… and on)

Vera:  Verusha, Verushka

Natalya: French form Natalie may occur; otherwise: Natasha, Tasha are the most common

Sonya:  this name in Russian is actually an affectionate form of Sofya.  Also Sonyushka

Andrei: French form André also used. Other Russian forms -  mainly  Andryusha

Mariya: Marie is used I’m sure .  Other Russian forms: Marya, Maryusha and many other variants

Lisa: French Lise.; not a Russian name in this form.  Affectionate form of Elizaveta

Vasili:  commonest diminutives Vasya, Vasska

Note that Helene - who I don’t think is ever referred to other than in the French form, would actually be Elena Vasilievna Kuragina in Russian

Also I think Julie Karagina is referred to in the French form rather than in the Russian form Yuliya

So that's it Team, let's get this troika on the snow...Ready...Steady....Tolstoy.

 

Booker cogitations...

I've been reading John McGahern not only because I love his writing but because I have carried on casting an eye over all things Irish since finishing Ulysses.
I still feel inordinately proud of that year of reading and I hope anyone who read along does too, especially looking back on the moments when it seemed impossible, and then those other moments when the scales dropped from the eyes and the bigger picture became apparent. Everyone who was anyone has a comment to make about James Joyce and I'm also finding Joycean techniques and allusions in plenty of other books I'm reading as a result. It's as if a door that felt firmly closed has been opened to reveal a previously invisible literary landscape and I'm very excited about Team Tolstoy which starts here tomorrow.

Love of the World, a collection of John McGahern's essays, has become a right-hand book, a port in a storm when I want soothing, intelligent words about books, reading, life et al, so I have read with great interest his essay entitled Why the Booker Is Such a Hard Bet and had many of my own dilemmas over it this year answered... or at least concerns assuaged.  I have felt convinced for the last three years that the prize may be sacrificing the inclusion of some exceptional writing on the altar of publicity and popularity.
But what do I know and how hard must this be?
The judges dilemma when faced with having to pick a few books out of more than a hundred and as John McGahern explains

'Every serious reader has at least one book they resisted fiercely at first, a resistance that may have lasted for years to a work that has become an important part of their life. A decision has to be made on all these books over a few. brief moments.'

I have resisted several of this year's Booker long-listers 'fiercely' knowing full well I may come to an understanding of them eventually, had I been a judge this year (heaven forfend) I may well have lay down and refused to move before agreeing to the inclusion of a couple, but I suspect a great deal of give-and take bargaining goes on...
...let this diamond of mine in and I'll let you have that turkey, because this is all about personal reading taste in the end surely?
Writing of his experience as a judge John McGahern sheds light on the process, and those early feelings of dismay and inadequacy, initially subsumed by the first and easier stages of the judging, which quickly resurfaced as the task became increasingly difficult.

'Books without any support were eliminated, while those with the support of one judge were retained. From here on in the real difficulty began. No two judges had the same taste and at this stage all the rejected books had been admired and liked by someone...change a committee and you'll change most of the books on the shortlist and. almost certainly, the eventual winner.'

Take pity on the plight of the shortlisted author too, that posh dinner doesn't sound much like the picnic we think, John McGahern proceeds to describe his own experience as a shortlisted author for Amongst Women

'...all of it was interesting, some of it pleasurable, but, overall far from enjoyable. It's as if one's life was in abeyance as the days ground down to Booker night.'

Hilary Mantel said as much last year, likening it to that interminable wait for exam results.
John McGahern concedes graciously,

'...I learned that it has nothing to do with writing or reading or reflection : everything about it has to do with publishing. The publishers had believed in the book from the beginning, had worked well and hard to get it noticed and now it was getting widespread attention...it was their night and I was glad to have played my part.'

and he draws this salutary conclusion

'Without the book business it would be difficult or impossible for true books to find their true readers and without that solitary (and potentially subversive) figure alone with a book the whole razzmattaz of prize, banquets, television, spectaculars, bestseller lists, even literature courses, editors and authors, are all worthless. Unless a book finds lovers among these solitary readers, it will not live ... or live for long.'

Hooray for us readers I say.

On this day in 1620...

...the Pilgrim Fathers set sail from the Mayflower Steps here,

and headed out across Plymouth Sound back the way Charles Lindbergh had flown in... more or less

These pictures taken as we walked along Plymouth Hoe last week and who should we bump into but ...

Francis Drake, local lad, born and raised in Tavistock, who was just back from a game of bowls before setting off to deal with the Spanish Armada, this being simultaneously 1588.
Never let it be said I don't bring you living history all the way from Devon.

The Flight of the Century: Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation ~ Thomas Kessner

So having established that I had little interest in the rise of American aviation, but that wrapped around an interesting and controversial life I could be tempted, I embarked on The Flight of the Century - Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation by Thomas Kessner (published today by Oxford University Press) with an open mind and a huge and vacant vault in the old knowledge bank ready to be filled.
In which case I couldn't have chosen a better and more balanced account because Thomas Kessner prioritises his material carefully assigning a mere three pages to the event that could have spun the book out to a thousand pages, the kidnap and subsequent murder of Charles and Anne Lindbergh's son Charles Junior, thus bringing the book home in a very readable and completely fascinating 340 pages, and a read that got me out of any clearing up/ housework/ ironing for the three days that I was reading it...sorry, he's just taken off, can't hang about.
Any voyeuristic notions into the digging of the dirt were confounded but ultimately not disappointed as throughout the book Thomas Kessner offers rational and well-argued evidence for the rise and fall of this great American hero.
The fall from grace came with the education-poor but experience-rich Charles Lindbergh's increasingly Fascist leanings which toppled into outright support for Hitler during the Second World War, and even I could sense the distress that this must have caused the American nation, who having lionised him then had to somehow distance themselves from their hero. Thomas Kessner admirably charts the rise of this astonishing young man, hoisted somewhat unwillingly onto the pedestal following an epic feat of endurance so in keeping with his character traits that, on reflection it comes as little surprise that Lindbergh made that solo first airborne crossing from America to Paris on May 20th 1927.
The book held me completely in its thrall apart from a couple of interludes, when the aviation industry detail lost my interest very briefly which was more than compensated for by the Lindbergh content, as the barnstorming aerial stuntman who had diverted his energies into helping to organise a fledgling airmail post service across the US, set his sights on the greatest challenge.The attrition rate was high for the postal aviators, of forty or so pilots over thirty were killed flying poorly maintained and obsolete planes.
Diversion from flight path ::
It all reminded me of the last-minute package holiday to Yugoslavia that a student-nursing friend and I had bought for £48 in 1973 from someone who couldn't go.
We were flying from Luton Airport with that thankfully now obsolete company Court Line and, as we climbed the steps into our bright pink aeroplane to be greeted by a flight attendant clad in Mary Quant designer uniform, were quite (verging on very) distressed to see the words Royal Mail clearly visible beneath the plane's luminous new livery, whilst happy (sort of) to find ourselves seated next to four trainee Catholic priests headed for the same holiday as us (another story best left untold).
Back on flight path :: Raised in a dysfunctional family and torn between unreconciled parents, Charles Lindbergh seemed to take limited emotional coping strategies into adulthood but countless other practical skills that would serve him well for the immediate task in hand. When the $20,000 prize was offered for the first flight from New York to Paris it was inevitable it would eventually be chocks away for Spirit of St Louis and this self-reliant, obsessive and reserved young man.
The competition was fierce, aviation still very much in its infancy, fraught with danger and with an embryonic misunderstanding of the technical know-how required to get a heavy lump of machinery airborne.
The French airmen Nungesser and Coli, immortalised on a commemorative stamp (yes, one in my old stamp album)  had died in their attempt to fly from Paris to New York in early May 1927 and unsurprisingly Lindbergh's main US competition for the prize failed to make it off the runway, thanks in no small part to the fitted kitchen and luxury sofas installed on the aircraft to make the Atlantic crossing that little bit more bearable.
Lindbergh, in contrast,

'changed the competition from a tawdry contest over money and personal pride into something nobler'

shaving every extra ounce of weight from his plane and its contents,even trimming the edges off his charts and probably taking laxatives the night before the flight.
Sorry I made that bit up, but it seems likely given that he sat perched in his flying fuel tank halfway across the Atlantic (and you're right he couldn't see out of the front) anguishing  over the weight of a lump of mud that had become attached to the fuselage during take off.
The account of the build up to the departure and then the flight itself is surprisingly moving and had me reading late into the night, spell-binding Boy's Own stuff that gripped the entire world at a time when the only heroes available were those forged in the crucible of battle. Charles Lindbergh emerged in that deeply scarred post-Great War period when the futility of the Jazz Age was at its height and the search for something more meaningful was becoming increasingly urgent, the world needed a new kind of peace-time hero and Charles Lindbergh was to be the one.
Mobbed by a crowd of 100,000 when he arrived at Le Bourget airport in Paris on the night of May 21st 1927, after his mammoth 33hrs 30mins 29.8secs flight, and with bits of Spirit of St Louis pulled off for souvenirs (wonder where those are now) things were apparently even worse when Lindbergh headed to the UK a few days later to be met with even more adulation. Croydon Airport had never seen the like before or since apparently.
Arriving in Paris Lindbergh was famously offered a chair to sit on which he politely declined having been doing little else for almost a day and a half.
What followed was the birth of celebrity almost as we know it. Plagued by the press, every move, every word followed and analysed and the denouement entirely predictable for a young man (Lindbergh just 25yrs old) whose single-mindedness had suited him admirably for feats of endurance but left him inflexible and ill-equipped to cope with the immediate demands of fame and adulation, and when it came to marriage and children... oh dear.
So there you have it, and I've barely scraped the surface of the book with this account but am now a burgeoning expert on all things aeronautical and Lindberghian and what an astonishing reading experience this has been, and I have also spent some pleasurable time reading this Lindbergh website, and this page in particular for fascinating Lindbergh encounters.
I am now very intrigued by the seemingly acquiescent figure (in Thomas Kessner's account) of Anne Morrow Lindbergh and have snapped up the five volumes of her diaries and letters (thank you for the recommend in comments last week) as well as some of her other writing (said to be sentimental but I'm keen to read) and a biography to find out more.
Meanwhile, as aeronautical mania raged across the US, Charles Lindbergh devoted much time and energy to promoting the cause, flying Spirit of St Louis around every state and eating sixty nine formal dinners along the way; the hero-worship grew to immense proportions and one can only be worried for the babies given the strange names as a result.
I wonder how little Aerogene fared in her later life.

The Battle of the Dessert Apple is fought and...

The suspense must be killing you.
So of course all the early-morning balloon watching threw out my carefully timed schedule completely and the tension was mounting as we went and picked and chose our apples and kept dropping the best ones, and then had to get a ladder out to reach some more at which point the kitchen table looked this.
Don't ask why we didn't do it the day before, I don't know either.
With the decision made, suitable candidates selected and knowing the Village Show competition would be fierce, this being the Tamar Valley where apples are it. Fifteen entries in the Dessert Apple class so we were particularly pleased with this...

Yes, he snatched it, but only just

and heavens to betsy, we will never hear the last of this.

The Village Chutney Champion will be defending his title next year of course.
Meanwhile I think you may be able to guess the derivation of  influence for this mini-installation Flowers in a Teacup which nabbed a second prize with the advice to use Oasis to increase my chances of success in the future...I had just shoved in some water and hoped the leafy things would hold everything else in place.

Second prize for my last-minute patchwork entry, the Divine Guidance Baltimore block that I made ages ago.
The cardigan won first in the hand-knitted article section probably because it was the only entry, so I have consoled myself with the fact that the WI judges do only award a first if they think it's up to snuff.

And they don't miss a trick, that comment reads ...
' Beautifully knitted with lovely wool - the only fault I could find was the front bands are quite different lengths, maybe more stitches picked up one side or the other?'
Ahem...remember this? January 10th to be exact...

"Sorting out how many stitches I'd then need to pick up for the offset rib button band was a challenge that became an endurance test because offset rib is very springy and gathers in above and beyond the usual. It took three attempts, a lot of frogging, three complete films and my stitch numbers up from 85 to 105 before I'd persuaded it to lay flat enough and unpuckered of its own accord, without me stretching it and imagining it flat and thinking a heavy iron would do the trick...and then I remembered I hadn't done the buttonholes."

Not a Barn Owl but...

... a balloon.
Loughborough University claiming squatters rights on the Branwolery at 8am this morning, drat those students.

Perfect conditions for this year's Tavistock Balloon Fiesta and the one year in five that they fly our way, we wake to an odder than usual noise outside the bedroom window, open the curtains and see people looking down on us


and this one so close we could almost touch them.

Got to dash, I'm 'in charge' of the Children's section at the Village Show so have to help them set up their exhibits and then steward the judges, and write out the certificates, and write down the winners, and add up the points and not get it all muddled up or I'll be put in the stocks. Plus flowers to find for my floral exhibit in a tea cup and fruit to pick, let the Dessert Apples War commence.
Bookhound slept next to his tree.





 
 

 

 

 

Village Show update

It's Rocky again, *sigh* overworked and living in expectation of tins of Sheba as my reward but I'm told to quit the moaning and just get on with it because apparently you won't want to miss this prize draw.
By the way she's off helping transform the Village Hall from a pre-school into a flower and vegetable show today and pssst.... I can tell you this because she's not here... she's in terrible trouble.
Entered socks AND a cardigan in Class 74 'A knitted article' and apparently that's against the rules.
*Sharp intake of breath*...the shame.
On the committee, doesn't know the rules.
Things got worse.
He had entered two varieties of apples in Class 44 'Dessert Apples, 4 of any one variety'.. and that's against the rules too.
There's been a phone call informing of this flagrant flouting of the law and choices have been made. The upshot is the cardigan makes the cut (which is good because the socks aren't finished) and him and her are going head to head in the Dessert Apple War.
Moving swiftly on to the important things, scroll down for gifts.

 

The Small Hand ~ Susan Hill - Prize draw for signed copies

So where were we.... oh yes, big thank yous to our Susan for this one.
Names in comments for one of three signed copies of Susan Hill's latest ghost story, The Small Hand published yesterday.
Susan Hill's ghost stories are becoming something of a welcome annual fixture on the literary calendar, and you won't be disappointed, you'll be sick with tension...

'And as I stood I felt a small hand creep into my right one, as if a child had come up beside me in the dimness and taken hold of it....'

The Small Hand has all the ingredients in perfect proportions and consummately mixed as the story ranges from the overgrown, derelict and neglected gardens surrounding The White House (not the Obama's one) to the wonderful contrast of the mountain top monastery of Saint Mathieu des Etoiles.
Susan has kindly agreed to send these worldwide to the three lucky winners, you jammy lot.
This weary cat will do the draw after the weekend....honestly anyone would think I didn't have better things to do.

and the winners are...

Hail me old chums, wring  yer withers and stand by the troika, Count Rockyonsky again. Heavens you lot have kept us amused with your odes, so Bookhound and I sent her off out for the afternoon because she kept interfering, and to be honest what does she know about this composing lark. We locked ourselves away for the choosing of the winners and what a tough cogitate that was, and thanks too for the Russian entry...
Вы для вашего входа мы огорченны вы не выиграло только понадеяться вы соединит прочитанные нас для.

Anyway, me and him have chewed it all over, had a few tantrums (him) and hissy fits (me) until we reached agreement, and here are the five lucky winners of a copy of War & Peace, which will be sent direct from Oxford University Press. We hear the copies are in the building so you won't have long to wait. Check it's really you here and send names and addresses to dovegreyreader at gmail dotcom, plus warn the postman to wear his back support.

14 Kate ( we are sending you very big hugs)

32 Curzon (nice succinct rhyme and meter old bean, well done)

44 Ruth (how could we resist the pleas of a 'feeling-old woman' whose eyesight's on the blink, we live with one of those after all)

61 Tom Kitten (Tom old mate, that was the longest entry, Tolstoy would have been proud of you)

68 Jenny (the gym bit really impressed us... plimsolls on and off you trot)

And as if I haven't put myself out enough already, she's given me another prize draw to sort while she's off gallivanting at the Village Show.
I'm sorry me old muckers, you'll just have to wait until tomorrow for that, I'm pooped even if it is more signed Susans.

 

 

 

Tara Books

I mentioned that I'm reading A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry at the moment and I have not the first shred of an idea why I haven't read it until now.
It's one of those books that has drifted around the edges of my consciousness largely because of that beguiling cover picture with the little boy doing the rope trick, but had made it no further until it was urged onto my reading pile by our Canadian visitors this summer.
Set largely in Mumbai, from Partition through to a period of political turmoil in the 1970s, and such a beautifully and cleverly structured book, with a narrative that works its way forward and then back a few steps, forward and then back a bit further as each character is placed in the spotlight and their story revealed. Snippets of information like the pieces in a jigsaw left scattered around to be scooped up and eventually slotted into their rightful place as the novel develops.
Nothing more to add yet except to say that I though I am only halfway through, I can't possibly see how it can go pear-shaped and will be making it last several weeks more because I know I will be bereft when it ends. Interesting to see this novel won the Canadian Giller Prize in 1995 and was shortlisted for the Booker in 1996, losing out to eventual winner Graham Swift's Last Orders. A year when I was on prize-list respite but had I been paying attention I would have been filled with enthusiasm for a shortlist that also contained Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, Every Man For Himself by Beryl Bainbridge, Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane and The Orchard on Fire by Shena McKay, strong contenders all.
I'll let you guess which book I liked the least.
But there's nothing like a book to pique my interest in a country and make me want to read more, so I scoured the shelves for some more reading on and around India. I picked up A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth but reluctantly put it back (War & Peace feels like enough of a chunkster for now) but did pull out Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu having enjoyed The Age of Shiva very much a while back. Then I came across J.G.Farrell's The Seige of Krishnapur which someone recommended to me years ago, any more suggestions most welcome.
I was then coincidentally contacted by Indian-based publisher Tara Books so was in a state of readiness for all things Indian sub-continent.
It would seem that the smaller publishers (thinking about Peirene Press in recent months) are targeting the blogosphere for their publicity, so I'm aware that there may now be a flurry of Tara Books posts around. That is often sufficient to make me shelve a book and bring it out when the dust has settled a little, overkill can sometimes work against the best of intentions but I would hate that to happen here, because Tara Books does feel a little different.
Based in Chennai, India; a collective owned by the people who run it, unashamedly proud of their feminist guiding principles and with large numbers of the books made by hand. Paper made from a mixture of cotton cloth waste and tree bark, rice husk or grass, with each page of the book screen printed or letter pressed.
The catalogue itself beautifully designed and screen printed and a growing list that reveals an eclectic mix of visual art, photography, art and folklore traditions as well as fiction.
Interestingly in amongst I spot a hand-made copy of Antigone, a title to which all my antennae now wander, this being one of the first set books on the forthcoming Open University English Literature MA, still very much in my sights to embark on this October, especially now the course material has arrived. I'll update you soon on the strange mix of sheer terror overlaid with swathes of self-doubt and indecision and coupled with inexplicable excitement at the thought of new learning, all induced in about ten seconds by the sight of that box in the postman's hand.


Tara Books have very kindly been sent me a copy of Daisy Hasan's novel The To-Let House and though not hand made, very nicely produced...what is the allure of the French flap? I love them and with the novel's setting in north-east India; a coming of age story framed by the region's own violent search for identity, this will be the perfect companion read to A Fine Balance.
So my grateful thanks to Tara Books, who I know have to think very carefully before they send out free copies of their books, I just wanted you to know I'll get there eventually, blame Rohinton Mistry and his 614 pages.