Flower Girl

http://player.vimeo.com/video/27920977?title=0&%3bbyline=0&%3bportrait=0href=

Do you think it's possible that a love of flowers could unite the world?

Or a love of nature?

Or even more simply, just love?

Love something.

Love of something unites us.

Like the philosopher says (Charlie Chaplin): "Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unwanted."

Thanks, Phyllis, for the link.

New Reviews

My latest book reviews, three short story collections, are now up, at the Prairie Fire Review of Books site on the U of M server.

Dennis E. Bolen Anticipated Results

Alexander MacLeod Light Lifting

Terence Young The End of the Ice Age

Check them out by clicking here, clicking on Current Issue, Prairie Fire, and then the PDF.


http://ojs.lib.umanitoba.ca/prairiefire

A Vacant Lot

A Vacant Lot

This blog has morphed into a sort of Reading Record so I will attempt to fill in the blanks since my last post six weeks ago. I have read two books which I would not have chosen before, as both are 500 pages long. I avoid "fat" books because I read too slowly. Too many books; too little time. And both are written by British writers and I have been focusing on Canadian literature. But I have no regrets. I also read books which I discover at garage sales and which may have been on my To Read list. I consider the serendipity a kind of gift. The universe saying to me: You'll enjoy this. These include The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. I agree with her own comments about how it could have been better. And Canadian photographer Freeman Patterson's Photography and the Art of Seeing. I love how he's interested in "more than focus," in the art of the image, although I prefer his Photography of Natural Things. In the former, he avoids macro and is not big on colour, whereas I like both of these elements. Other books I've read this year but not mentioned on the blog: Ian Rankin's A Good Hanging and The Complaints (good, but I do love Rebus); Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner; Gail Bowen's Burying Ariel; Ian McEwan's Chesil Beach; Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures; Austin Clarke's Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack (not as good as his fiction). The two fat books I just finished are A.S. Byatt's Possession (check out the Bookdrum's profile), and Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, which I will post about next. Now I've begun reading the first of three Canadian books I am scheduled to review for Prairie Fire. I also have two books waiting at the library. One continues my Lyme Regis quest; the other is related to my plan to profile a Canadian novel for Bookdrum. To be continued . . . I cannot think of an appropriate visual for this posting, so I've chosen "My life as a vacant lot." (Tongue-in-cheek.) This beautiful vacant lot is in my home town. Or a snap my cousin took of me at her house. "The true reader." Who needs more in life than a good book and a loving cat?

Jane Austen's Persuasion

Jane Austen's Persuasion

Believe it! Cover design matters. An old painting on a Penguin cover of Jane Austen's PERSUASION hooks my eye at Pages, our local used books store. It looks familiar. "Cobb Gate, Lyme Regis" the blurb explains. "Attributed to Reed, by permission of the Trustees of the Philpot Museum, Lyme Regis." (I am hoping, assuming, it's public domain as no amount of searching of Lyme Regis, Dorset, UK or the Philpot Museum has turned up any contact information.) The novel's an Austen I know I haven't read. So I buy it, and I do.

It is typical Austen--relationships, courtships, boy loses girl, man finds woman, etc. With the writer's amazing grasp of psychology. The telling details which reveal character. The injustice and waste of potential in "the system" which places so little value on females and their contribution. Best of all, the pivotal scene in the plot happens on The Cobb, Lyme Regis. I've been there, and I intend to return--for the several literary connections, and for the way that the location combines two of my passions--geology and literature. The last time I was there I inquired after writer John Fowles who has since left us. But Tracy Chevalier and Ian McEwan have taken up the mantles of Austen and Fowles. I've ordered their novels, and I've pulled out the maps, to plan for my dream return to Dorset and Somerset, to ancestral and cultural origins.

The Cobb, Lyme Regis

The Cobb, Lyme Regis

So I pull out my old photo album, looking for shots I haven't scanned, of Lyme Regis and The Cobb (a kind of manmade breakwater referred to in documents as far back as the 1200s.) One of my snapshots is a dead ringer, switching the colours from brown to blue, for the Reed painting on the Penguin Austen. The extra little dome in my shot is the Philpot Museum. The day I was there, a storm discouraged taking enough time to really focus. But it was still impressive--vulnerable humanity standing alone, at the mercy of wind and water, beneath a threatening sky. Just like Sarah Woodruff, Tragedy, in John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman. Loved the book. Loved the film adaptation.

The French Lieutenant's Woman

The French Lieutenant's Woman

In The French Lieutenant's Woman, the intrusive modern narrator tells and retells a story of a "fallen" woman in Lyme in 1867. Concern for her becomes an obsession which causes a tragedy in the lives of a young gentleman, Charles Smithson, and his fiancee, Ernestina Freeman. The writer, using citations, asides, dialogue, narrative commentary, and plot twists, unfurls a theme familiar to both Austen and Thomas Hardy--the injustice experienced by women in Victorian society. In the end, Fowles offers readers a choice of endings, one comic, one tragic.

The French Lieutenant's Woman

The French Lieutenant's Woman

Now this becomes a study in serendipity. In waiting for the door to open. For me, it has always been "When the student is ready, the book appears." On a fruitless quest into Chilliwack (to No-Service Canada), I reward myself with a visit to The Bookman Used Books, a dangerous store at the best of times. And there, on the sale tables outside, an iconic image. Tragedy on The Cobb, where the sight of her first snagged Charles' attention. I would have paid $3 just for the cover, which I plan to print and frame. Bought it. Read it. How do you write a screenplay with two endings? Pinter figured out a way. Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. Thirty years old and it still seems both modern and relevant. Is it just me? Are intelligent movies still being made?