Tiah Beautement's Blog, page 107

On my third Barbara Trapido

Barbara Trapido, The Travelling Hornplayer - When you are young enough...you still, perhaps, have options about the kind of person you will become. I became, because of her dying, a more earnest, more straight-faced, more directed person. It may be that I became a bit of a bore. - - Throughout our childhoods Lydia and I distrusted any prize-winning book because we knew it would be worthy; and for worthy, we read boring. - - Downstairs I find the family large and gruesome. Ironically, it is just like the family I dreamed up for myself in childhood - ranks of...

On endings

We hold up our novels like vanity mirrors, hoping to reflect our own dreams, conceits, and liberal aspirations. Duly satisfied with our novels' conclusions, we put them back down, happy and content. A week later all is forgotten. . . But not those novels without end, steeped in ambiguity, those novels stay with us. We can't shake them off, no matter how hard we try. They haunt us, mock us, they hang around waiting for us in the shadows, they disturb our working days, disrupt our sleep, torment us, force us to participate on their own terms. - Lee Rourke,...

On The King's English

Betsy Burton, The King's English - But in defense of my drug of choice, good mysteries are good novels, even if the art and craft of writing the mystery are markedly different from that of other forms of fiction. - - Poetry is always building these connections. It's not showing off. It's the verbalization of the internal life of man. And each poet forges a link in the chain, so that it can go on. - - We don't believe that just because a group of people has proclaimed itself the "moral majority," its members really do live on some...

On exiles

That's what happens to exiles; they are scattered to the four winds and then find it extremely difficult to get back together again. - Isabel Allende, Paula -

On writing companions

Orwell: poking out from under desk, wedged between chair and paper shredder

On inner peace

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behaviour. - Fran Lebowitz -

On my second Barbara Trapido

Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack - 'What did you do?' she said. I had been deflowered in a hotel room and had taken blackberries from the hand of a beautiful young man who played the violin and routed the Holy Ghost. I had seen a human placenta and a new-born baby. I had learned about crochet hooks and copper clamps in the cervix and egg yolks in the soup. I had found an older woman to emulate and admire in place of my mother. 'I watched Ava Gardner on the telly,' I said. - - I spent...

It's that time of year

I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then - Lewis Carol, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass -

On The Night Circus

- = Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus - 'What does exsanguinated mean?' The girl smiles. 'It means draining all your blood,' she says. 'But they don't actually do that, I don't think.' - - I sometimes suspect the entirety of the circus is itself a complex illusion of illumination - - She feels as though there was something else she meant to ask, but now she cannot recall what it was. She cannot recall much of anything about the conversation, save for the impression that there is something else she should be spending her time on, somewhere else to be,...

On buying groceries

I allowed a rude woman to impact my day. I was at the shop, trying to obtain a trolley. Not a straightforward task, even at the best of times. The muscles are strong enough, but the little adjustments to work one out pulls at joints – the wrists, the ribs, the elbows, the hips, the knees – and my ligaments moan. But today some employee had smashed them together so that they only came out two by two. I could not pull them apart. Ribs already groaning, I tried to push a set away because I could see that the...