B. Morrison's Blog, page 58

Playlist 2014

My expectations for this year have all been overturned. I was certain that I knew what the shape of this year would be, this changed life. But my ideas were replaced by new, maybe better dreams and plenty. Thes are the songs that kept me company. Many thanks to my friends for their music.

These Days, Tom Rush

Urge For Going, Tom Rush

Time Has Told Me, Nick Drake

Blue Moon With Heartache, Rosanne Cash

Open Road , Michael G. Ronstadt

Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes, Paul Simon

Harvest Tune,...

Long for This World, by Jonathan Weiner

A few weeks ago my son mentioned that new medical research may well extend our lives significantly, even for those of us alive today. So when I saw a recommendation for this book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Beak of the Finch, I jumped on it. I was prepared for some heavy reading but in fact the book flew by, the science delivered in small, easily digestible bites. Weiner has an outstanding ability to describe the particulars of the research being done such that a layman can ea...

Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times, by Jennifer Worth

I’ve greatly enjoyed this series on PBS, but hadn’t thought about reading the books upon which they are based until my friend, Cynthia, advised me that they were even better than the show. I usually assume books to be much better than their film incarnations, if only because films must condense the story and often lose much of the subtlety and shading. However, in this case the films are so good that I couldn’t believe the books could be better. I was wrong.

In the early 1950s Worth, then Jen...

Hungover Poet, by Natasha Ramsey

This book left me reeling. Ramsey’s poems of love and anger and redemption explode from the page. Full of outrage, raw hurt and tender caresses, they command the reader’s attention and emotion.

Some poems are not as strong as others, but what fascinates me is the way they gather force as the book continues. In the middle sections, Ramsey takes on various personas—someone dying of AIDS, someone on death row—to explore even more intense experiences. And the poems in the last section are simply...

A History of Future Cities, by Daniel Brook

In this fascinating and readable book, Daniel Brook explores four cities—St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai—that were purposely built as gateways to the world. They do not seem to belong where they are located, but instead ignore native culture and become cities that could be located anywhere. Brook’s focus on their architecture brings this element to the fore: a room copied from the Vatican in St. Petersburg’s royal palace, Art Deco hotels in Shanghai that look like Manhattan, a uni...

Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata

This 1956 novel takes place at a hot spring in the western part of Japan’s main island, where winds from Siberia dump up to fifteen feet of snow in the winter. The long snowbound months create a sense of isolation, even a time outside of time. As the story opens, Shimamura is traveling by train to a certain hot-spring inn to see a woman he’d met in the spring when he’d come to climb the mountains. During this time in Japan, the hot springs were not like spas in Europe or the U.S., but rather...

This Isn’t Easy for Me, by Julian Berengaut

I came to this novel with a certain wariness. For one thing it is written entirely in dialogue, which in itself is not an easy thing to pull off and further complicated by not having any dialogue tags or chapter breaks. For another, the two people talking are women and the author is a man. On the other hand, it had been praised by Jen Michalski, an accomplished author herself and a friend.

I needn’t have worried. The two women’s voices are sufficiently distinct that I knew who was talking wi...

Andrew Wyeth, Looking Out, Looking In

I spent hours at the National Gallery’s show of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings of windows, “Looking Out, Looking In”. Entering these four rooms of paintings felt like coming home. The rooms are grouped by place: the Olson House, the Kuerner Farm, Wyeth’s Brandywine Studio, and a final room called Variations.

But it was the paintings themselves that so appealed to me. Spare and austere, with little color, they all include windows but no people. As Nancy K. Anderson describes in her catalogue essay,...

#BloggerBlackout

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USEFUL LINKS

Bibliodaze: An Open Letter to Kathleen Hale & Guardian Books: Stalking Is Not Okay.

Bibliodaze: #HaleNo, Blogger Blackout and the Non-Existent War

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books: The Choices of Kathleen Hale

Alex Hurst: Hale vs Harris, and the Breach of Online Ethics

The Writer’s Chronicle, Volume 29, Number 2

There are a lot of changes going on, and I don’t just mean the cold wind that blew in last night. Granted, some of them are still just whispers, but I know they will manifest themselves sooner or later. I don’t like change more than the next person, but I’ve learned to treasure my moments standing on the threshold, to love the liminal spaces that hold so much promise.

One thing that hasn’t changed, despite reams of blogs and tweets and status updates, is my love of long, closely reasoned ess...