Julia Hedge's Laces

WIP Wednesdays. . .

2012-02-15T06:00:00.000-05:00

The endless hexipuffs continue. I've started sewing them together - not because I'm all done with knitting them (I only have about 50 out of probably 200 that I need), but because if I ever do finish with them, the enormous job of seaming them all at once will probably be the end of me and I'll never get around to it. The pattern calls for just a few stitches at every meeting point, but I find it a bit floppy so I'm actually sewing up each side. A long way to go, but I am going to try and finish this by the end of 2012.

Happy Valentine's Day. . .

2012-02-14T12:14:00.000-05:00

The Guardian has posted a list of the Top 10 Best Love Letters complete with visuals which you can read here. I like the one from Charlotte Bronte to Professor Heger, all ripped up and reconstructed by Heger's wife.

Here's the cute card my sweetie gave me and while the sentiment is of course lovely, it's the fact that he sought out a knitting-inspired Valentine that most touched my cynical holidays-are-too-commercial heart. The accompanying chocolates also helped. I think he may be a keeper.

National Sweater Day. . .

2012-02-09T06:00:00.000-05:00

Count me in with this great idea (though this is my basic philosophy throughout the winter), and I don't even need a reminder call from a granny, though this part of the campaign is very funny. More info at the official site here. So get cozy and get your favourite one on. Though I'm very fond of my first ever knitted sweater, I really, really love this one that I bought last fall from Roots. It's called the cabin sweater though I tend to think of it as my sock monkey sweater. It's very flattering on the body, there are handy pockets and it's very warm. There are red stripes on the sleeve cuffs and on the back of the collar too.

WIP Wednesdays. . .

2012-02-08T06:00:00.000-05:00

This is the beginnings of the Ilkley Shawl designed by Torontonian Laura Chau. I knit one for my Mum as a Christmas present and she loved it. And my boyfriend's mother loved it. So I offered to knit one for her too and asked her what colours she would like. And she said she wanted the EXACT same one as my Mum. Okay knitters, hopefully you can see my dilemma. Apart from not wanting to knit the same thing over again ( not the pattern which I love, but you have to try different colour combinations to keep things fresh don't you?), I feel uneasy about two mums wearing the exact same shawl which they could very well do next Christmas if we again spend it all together. So I just can't do it. I'm using more or less the same colours but I'm varying the width of the stripes and while my Mum's had a charcoal gray background, this one will be red with the gray as one of the contrasting colours. I'm hoping that once it's actually finished and gifted, she won't mind the changes and will appreciate having her own slightly different shawl. Fingers crossed!

The Angst-Ridden Executive. . .

2012-02-07T15:26:00.000-05:00

It's always a delight discovering a new mystery series and this one is a lot of fun. It's part of Melville House's International Crime Series and though The Angst-Ridden Executive by Manuel Vazquez Montalban, translated by Ed Emery, is the third in the series (there are more titles coming out this year), there's no problem with jumping right in (although I 'd like to read the fourth one next - I think it's Southern Seas - to possibly understand the fallout from the ending of this one). Our private detective is Pepe Carvalho, formally imprisoned under the Franco regime, a man who once worked for the CIA and has now set up his own business. He loves women, good food (obsessively and gluttonously), talking politics and (strangely) burning the odd book in his fireplace. To relax he likes to cook, "something slightly painstaking and packed with stimulation and small difficulties", or go to the movies, with a particular taste for classic Hollywood noir. It all seems to help him in his job:

Yet more role models! Which should he choose? Whom should he copy? Bogart playing Chandler? Alan Ladd doing Hammett? Paul Newman as Harper? Gene Hackman? In the privacy of his car as it crept up the slopes of Tibidabo, Carvalho practiced the mannerisms of each of them. Bogart's dewy-eyed look and the contemptuous curl of the lip. Alan Ladd, and the way he walked as tall as possible to cover up for how short he was. Then there was Newman, with his self-awareness of being so very good-looking. And Hackman, with the look of a man who's been jilted by his wife, weighs two hundred pounds, and is tired of life.

The above excerpt gives a small sense of Montalban's writing style which I'd characterize as sophisticated wisecracking. Pepe is cynical, world weary and impatient. He doesn't suffer fools or corruption gladly, but there is a generous heart located somewhere amidst the cholesterol. I haven't written much about the plot (a wealthy executive is found murdered with a pair of knickers in his pocket and Pepe doesn't buy the official version that he was killed by a pimp), simply because this isn't really a whodunit in the traditional sense. There's no clever plotting and accumulation of clues; this is certainly not a country house cozy. Suspicion for the murder falls on the group of friends closest to the murdered executive, who have remained in touch but followed widely different paths in the wake of Franco's death, and it is in this vivid and vibrant portrait of a still uncertain Spanish society trying to come to grips with its political past, that the book most intrigued me. And the food descriptions won't disappoint. Despite its occasional violence and dated misogyny (the book was originally published in 1977), I did chuckle quite a bit throughout and I'd definitely read another in this series.

February Reading. . .

2012-02-01T08:59:00.000-05:00

I've been in the reading doldrums recently. Partly it's because I've been spending all my spare time on knitting projects. But as a book rep, at this time of year, I need to dip into the first chapters of a lot of different manuscripts in order to get a feel for the book to help me in my selling appointments, and this type of scattered and unfinished reading always feels rushed and unsatisfying.

But I'm going to turn it all around this month. Usually I get my reading mojo back by turning to the classics, and listening to the radio this morning, I heard about a terrific idea for an online bookclub. Check out the City Builder Book Club which over the next few months will be facilitating a group read of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in order to discuss how cities work. The reading pace is very reasonable with just two chapters a week. Sign me up - this book has been on my reading pile for ages and as a proud Torontonian, I'm actually embarrassed that I haven't yet read it, although I have read some of her other books. No excuse now.

I was lucky enough to have a lovely conversation with Jane Jacobs several years ago. I picked her up to drive her to an event at the University of Toronto where she was participating in a celebration of the Modern Library. She'd just written an introduction to Dickens' Hard Times and though the drive was short we had a wonderful chat about the power of literature to change social policy, touching of course on Dickens but also Upton Sinclair (she'd also written an intro to The Jungle). Oh, she was such a delightful woman.

Then I got to thinking about Dickens. The literary world is of course celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth this year with all sorts of read-a-longs, reappraisals, exhibits and just general joy. I've been meaning to pick up some Dickens myself and as his birthday is February 7th, this is the month to do it. I want to tackle one of the novels I haven't previously read, so I've scanned the shelves and have settled on The Old Curiosity Shop. Really looking forward to it.

Right, that's February's reading sorted. Now, if I could only work out how to read and knit at the same time.

Ta Da . . .

2012-01-31T14:45:00.001-05:00

A milestone in my admittedly short knitting career, but I can't help feeling a bit chuffed. This is my first ever sweater - and it FITS! Okay, in a perfect world, it would be an inch or so longer on the front and the back, but the fit widthwise and under the arms is great so I'm just going to leave it as is. The pattern is a Rowan one by Martin Storey called Dusk. I used one and half skeins of Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool that I got very cheaply in the sale bins at Romni. The skeins are huge - 425 meters each - and so I knew I wouldn't run out of yarn at a crucial moment. It's very warm. And now that I've conquered my fear of mattress stitch (who knew it could be so much fun?) I now have the confidence to try something more challenging. Oooh, it just feels so good to get this project finished.

New From NYRB. . .

2012-01-30T11:23:00.000-05:00

It’s been ages since I gave NYRB Classics a bit of love, but I recently read another one of their amazing gems and so the gushing has to commence again.

The book this time is The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnball. I’d previously read his surrealist collection of short stories, Memories of the Future, so I knew to expect something wild and different. Like that collection, The Letter Killers’ Club is similarly filled with great storytelling but it’s got an added narrative and thematic structure that creates a really original and thought-provoking read. Our narrator gets pulled into a mysterious club that meets every Saturday in a room filled with empty bookshelves. The members each take turns relating their own fictional tales, but from the top of their head, with no notes to refer to. These stories cannot and never will be written down because the club is devoted to the idea of clearing the mind from the overwhelming and artistically suffocating existence of the world's printed pages, in order to focus on the simplicity and purity of literary "conceptions." The stories that follow are marvellous and diverse, ranging from a sci-fi tale about a bacteria experiment, designed to control the movements of limbs, that turns into a nightmarish world of mind-controlled drones and their dictators, to a comic tale about three men trying to decided definitively what mouths were specifically created for - whether to kiss, eat, or to spout words. My favourite is the first tale, read aloud as a play about Guilden and Stern both competing for the role of Hamlet, which involves a visit to a shadowy, muttering cavern filled with former "roles", including Richard Burbage who takes the opportunity to escape. It's very clever and amusing.

Weaved in among the stories however, is our narrator's growing unease as he observes the different members, in particular a mysterious man named Rar who will eventually reveal just why the narrator has been invited to this exclusive club. There's a very sophisticated and intriguing debate running through this novel about the danger and yet universal necessity of the printed word - which of course our narrator can't help setting down in the very book we are reading. Fans of Calvino, Borges and even Beckett would enjoy this, along with readers of Orwell, Wells and Huxley. It nestles very nicely, if a bit rebelliously, on the shelf of books about books and bibliophiles.

I have a few other recently published NYRB classics on the to-be-read-soon pile, all by writers I’ve previously read and admired, so I know I’m in for a treat. Albert Cossery has a really unique literary style, combining political satire with a sense of absurdity cushioned by humanity. The Jokers was a fantastic read and I’m sure Proud Beggars will also deliver – plus I’m intrigued to read political fiction set in Cairo in the wake of Egypt’s ongoing protests. I also have copies of Gregor von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol (his Memoirs of an Anti-Semite was such an unusual and powerful book), and Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories. I’ve read his novel Assistant, plus in lieu of getting someday to Berlin myself (it's on the bucket list!) I enjoy reading about the city, particularly in the early 20^th century, an interest fueled after devouring Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and then watching all of Fassbinder’s movie in a marathon three days (we won’t rant about the epilogue today).

Coming out in March will be Amsterdam Stories by a new writer to me, who goes under the pseudonym Nescio. His short stories have been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald and I have visited Amsterdam, so I’m very much looking forward to the collection. And then in April, NYRB is continuing to bring out the work of Stefan Zweig and will be publishing Confusion, about a civil servant’s love of reading and scholarship. I’ve read and enjoyed a number of Zweig’s books, and I’m also thinking it might be a very good companion piece to one of my favourite NYRB titles of all time – John Williams’ heartbreaking Stoner.

Over on their tumblr page, NYRB has posted a fall preview here and here for a fix of even more forthcoming goodies.

On Trend. . .

2012-01-28T19:43:00.000-05:00

So Tangerine Tango was chosen as THE colour of 2012 and it's lovely and vibrant and energizing and I'd love to knit a sweater in this colour. But for now, a simple cowl will have to do. I found a skein of Italian Feltro Lana Grossa in the sale area at Romni for only $5.00 and knit this up very quickly. Since I tend to wear a lot of gray (I'm trying to change this), I figure this will cheer things up for the remainder of the winter.

WIP Wednesdays. . .

2012-01-25T07:13:00.027-05:00

I got two quite large skeins of New Zealand mohair for xmas and have been wondering what to do with them. There wasn't quite enough for a sweater and I'm not sure I want that much fluffiness/fuzziness in a knitted garment. I decided it would be lovely for a really big shawl especially if I stripe it with other wool. Off to swatch.

I'm going with the one on the left - it's a ruching/ribbon stitch from Barbara G. Walker's stitch dictionary, A Treasury of Knitting Patterns Volume One (which is so drool worthy - I'm going to have to acquire all of her volumes).

This is going to be a BIG shawl - there are 600 stitches in the ribbon part - but I think it's going to be lovely and warm. It's also using up a fair bit of my stash. And, I have a colour scheme and an idea that, if it all works (and that's a big IF), will have an inspirational tie to Virginia Woolf. We'll see. At the moment, it's a big, furry snake.

Work In Progress Wednesdays. . .

2012-01-18T21:42:00.000-05:00

Lots of knitting bloggers are starting WIP Wednesdays, so to keep me on track with all of my many, many projects, I'm determined to post some progress every week. I'm half-way through the second sleeve of my first ever sweater. Front and back have been blocked and I hope to have the sleeves blocked and dry by the weekend so I can then attempt to seam this baby up. Then I'm supposed to pick up a number of stitches at the top edge to knit a ribbed collar. I'm debating whether to do it in a contrasting colour just for fun. But first I need to seam and see if it fits.

I had an appointment in Kitchener earlier this week and took the opportunity to stop by Shall We Knit? for the very first time. What a beautiful yarn shop. It's located in a lovely house and has a wonderful selection of yarns, notions and lots of knitting books and patterns. My mum has just bought herself a new winter coat in a deep shade of purple (really quite a daring colour for her - I'm quite proud) and when I saw this skein of hand painted Misti Alpaca Super Chunky named The Magic Flute, I just knew it would be perfect for a small, but cozy cowl to match the coat. I'm casting on for that tonight.

Cozy Against the Cold. . .

2012-01-15T15:10:00.000-05:00

It's turned bitterly cold this weekend and I was determined to hibernate at home and just knit, read and cook comfort food. Until I realized I'd run out of butter (an essential ingredient for ALL comfort food) and had to venture out to the store. Since I'd bundled up anyways, I took the opportunity to take a photo in the natural light of my new, cozy cowl that I finished Saturday morning.

This was made from two skeins of Rowan Colourscape Chunky, designed by Kaffe Fassett and I just LOVE the colours which remind me of all the shades of pink and purple that one finds in winter sunsets. The repeats are quite long, so I tried all sorts of different stitch patterns and scarf ideas before settling on a big cowl that is stretchy enough to wrap around my neck twice. It just makes me very happy to look at the colours, although I realize now that I need a matching hat for the-head-that-seems-to-defy-all-pattern-sizes. Stay tuned.

I'm very pleased with my knitting progress so far this year. My first sweater is coming along. I've knitted the front and back and blocked them, and have started the first sleeve. I'm a bit worried it's too small for me, in which case it'll be a gift for my Mum, but we'll see. I also finished a pair of Fetching mitts from the Knitty pattern located here, which is a gift for my friend K's birthday.

And as for that comfort food: It was Mac n' Cheese in the slow cooker. Yes, the slow cooker. You may not get all the breadcrumb crunchy bits from the traditional oven method, but this is the creamiest mac n' cheese I've ever tasted. And there was plenty to freeze away for future lunches. The recipe is from the Canadian Living: Slow Cooker Collection by Elizabeth Baird.

And I found a great new podcast to listen to while getting on with my projects. A Playful Day is by a woman who lives in London, England, and is a relatively new but good and enthusiastic knitter, who also loves great food and likes to talk about both. I listened to a number of her back episodes and really enjoyed them.

I'll top off this weekend with dinner at my Mum's and then we'll watch the next episode of Downton Abbey. How many more weekends till spring?

Wanna Bet They Change The Title?

2012-01-13T14:59:00.000-05:00

Well, here's something to look forward to. Kenneth Branagh is directing a film version of the delightful novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society with Kate Winslet starring. Could be fun. Hope they leave the literary bits in. Story here.

It Had To Come Eventually. . .

2012-01-13T09:37:00.000-05:00

We've had our first blast of winter snow and the morning commute was extremely slow. These are the days when I'm glad to take the bus and have someone else do the driving. I had my knitting with me (and I'm working on something really colourful - it's just a joy to look at) and my iPOD and there was no more appropiate music to listen to than Kate Bush's latest album, 50 Words For Snow. I particularly like the title track which, not surprisingly, is more or less a list of 50 different words for the white stuff, set to music. But while Kate does the counting, Stephen Fry actually says the words in all his lovely British pluminess. My word for snow (not part of the list) is simply: Yuck.

Crowing for the Rooster!. . .

2012-01-12T09:27:00.000-05:00

Hooray, it's back! I'm talking about the Tournament of Books in which a list of sixteen novels from 2011 go head to head in several rounds until a winner is chosen and awarded the prestigious Rooster. What makes this exercise so much fun is the commentary by the judges on why they selected one book over another, which is then taken apart and analyzed by the "booth announcers" Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner. There's also a Zombie round where a book that's been booted out is resurrected based on readers' votes. It's all very entertaining. And they have a terrific shortlist this year which includes five books I've read in full or partially (I'll admit I'm stalled in the middle of Murakami's 1Q84), and several more that are definitely on my radar. The shortlist and judges were announced today; the tussle starts in March. All info is located here and you can vote for your favourite as well.

Keep Calm and Cast On. . .

2012-01-11T13:59:00.001-05:00

"Knitting is the saving of life."
- Virginia Woolf

I found the above quote in Keep Calm and Cast On: Good Advice for Knitters, a cute little book that I picked up in Waterstones on my holiday. It's compiled by acclaimed knit designer Erika Knight and is filled with lots of quotes from other designers and knit enthusiasts, bits of research on the health and stress reduction benefits of knitting and lots of useful tips, such as putting fluffy wool such as mohair into the fridge before knitting to make it easier to work with. Who knew?

I'm intrigued to do some research on Woolf and her knitting. These are the days (and there aren't many of them) when I miss being a grad student with library access to all sorts of online research databases.

Wrapping Up the Old and Anticipating the New. . .

2012-01-10T11:19:00.000-05:00

I didn't finish as many books last year as I normally do. I can't knit and read at the same time, and I was definitely more obsessed by the former. Still, looking through my reading journal last night, I was pleasantly reminded of many great reads from 2011. So here, in alphabetical order are the ten books that gave me the most reading pleasure last year:

After Midnight by Irmgard Keun, translated by Anthea Bell. This is a little masterpiece of a novel, set during a few days in 1930s Germany where a young girl contemplates both the effects of growing Nazism and growing up in equal measure, while attending a party. As moving as Mrs. Dalloway.

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje. As always, Ondaatje can paint such vivid and magical scenes. I was completely captivated by the unexpected people on board this journey.

Fair Play by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal. I'm already a big fan of Jansson, so I knew I would love this tiny but so astute portrait of two women friends and artists, over the course of their long-term relationship. How she can convey in such a slim volume all the complexity of female emotions mystifies me, but it is such a beautiful experience to absorb myself in her prose, especially when she's describing the Nordic landscape.

Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis. This was the book that occupied most of my reading life in 2011 as each chapter is so rich with historical details and amazing stories that I had to take many breaks. I am in complete awe at his research and dedication.

The London Train by Tessa Hadley. I loved this beautifully written novel which gets into the heads of two very different characters, on separate journeys, linked by a chance meeting on a train. The clever construction of this novel is one of its most pleasurable aspects.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Definitely deserved the Booker. A lovely little gem of a novel I will love to keep on rereading.

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst. A very interesting exploration of memory, literary legacy and the art of writing biography, told over several decades of the twentieth century.

There But For The by Ali Smith. Wonderfully inventive, funny and full of playful language and narrative. This novel about a man named Miles who goes to a dinner party and locks himself up in a bedroom, refusing to come down again - for weeks - is told in four voices, neither of them by Miles, of people who barely know him and yet Smith makes it all work. And it made me want to go and explore Greenwich.

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. This wasn't published in 2011, but I only got around to reading it last May. I was really impressed by the originality of the storytelling and how engrossed I was with the characters. And while I thought I would be rolling my eyeballs at the chapter told in powerpoint, it totally worked for that character's voice.

Vital Signs by Tessa McWatt. This was the most overlooked Canadian novel last year and it's a shame because it was such an interesting portrait of a long-term marriage undergoing a crisis, told from the husband's harsh but honest viewpoint. I love a character that is flawed and unsympathethic and there were some interesting twists. And it has my favourite ending of all the books I read this year.

As always, there were tons of books that I didn't get around to reading and are at the top of the pile now. These are the 5 books from last year I really, really want to read:

The Blue Book by A.L. Kennedy
Half of the Human Race by Anthony Quinn
Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt
Midsummer Night in the Workhouse by Diana Athill
Open City by Teju Cole

And if you want to whet your appetite for what's coming in 2012, The Millions has this excellent overview. I'm really looking forward to William Boyd's new one, Waiting For Sunrise, which takes place during WWI, and The Last Nude by Ellis Avery, a fictional account of the love affair between painter Tamara de Lempicka and her muse, set in 1927 Paris.

And I'm Off. . .

2012-01-08T12:35:00.000-05:00

I've done it! I've cast on for my first ever sweater. And I'm using my new square circular needles, which so far, I really love knitting with. They are supposed to be much easier on the hands. Long way (and many tears I'm sure) to go yet, but it feels so good to have started.

Happy New Year. . .

2012-01-07T10:25:00.000-05:00

I've spent the holidays in the U.K. where the weather was mild (I actually saw some crazy daffodils out!), the food was plentiful (no one does roast potatoes and puddings like the Brits), the walks were great (the above photo was taken on New Year's Eve in North Wales), and the telly kept me pretty well occupied with tons of celebrity chef Christmas specials - Jamie, Nigella, Delia, Nigel Slater - I watched them all. As well as the entire series of Jamie's Great Britain (I got his cookbook for xmas) which was terrific. All of which has inspired me to do far more cooking this year, buy more organic and local, and to try lots more new recipes.

My knitted gifts seemed to go down well (cable scarf for boyfriend, wool shawl for Mum) and I got such lovely knitting gifts in return - a set of needles, a beautiful Rowan pattern book and of course wool! My entire carry on case was filled to the brim with all the skeins I brought back; I'm completely inspired to start on all sorts of lovely projects and yes, 2012 will be the year that I finally tackle a sweater and get over my sleeve and seaming fear. To this effect, I found this fun widget that tracks how many meters you knit in one year which I've added on the right hand side. You can get one for your blog here.

I have many knitting resolutions in addition to the sweater. I want to try Fair Isle and double knitting. And I really, really want to finish up my log cabin blanket, now that I think I've cracked how to sew it together and add a border.

So here's to 2012 - a year I hope will be full of inspiration and good intentions, adventure and serendipity, health and happiness, and lots of great reading, knitting, film-going, cooking, eating, learning and walking. And I may even get out to my spin class one of these days!

More Successful Knitting. . .

2011-12-16T10:46:00.073-05:00

I've been knitting up a storm lately and really enjoying it. It's definitely become my latest obsession but completely relaxing and creative and fun. And with every new project, I always try a new technique, so my knitting skills are improving bit by bit. I'm working up to that sweater! There are two projects I've completed recently that turned out as good as I'd hoped and I really LOVE wearing them. The first came about when I learned to make a bobble. And immediately thought a bobble scarf would be really fun for winter. I had three skeins of this really soft baby alpaca and this was the result, which I designed myself (not that it's a particularly difficult design, but what I love about knitting is that with a bit of patience and some tweaking and swatching, you can really create exactly what you want). This scarf is so warm and cozy. My recent hat attempts were all in aid of matching this.

My colleague gave me a very funny Christmas gift this week - the DVD of the Royal Wedding.

We were working a conference in Jasper, Alberta at the time (which is seven hours behind the UK) and sharing a hotel room. Now, I really like watching these spectacles live and since the coverage was starting about midnight, I decided just to stay up all night. I wanted to see ALL the hats. Perhaps though, this was not the best choice when I had to work the next day and the last time I pulled an all-nighter was decades ago. My colleague was a great sport about it insisting she could sleep through the light of the television which was turned down low. However, she could not sleep through my loud curses at about 2am when it started to snow outside and the storm knocked out ALL the channels, just as things were getting exciting. I was flipping madly and getting only static until for some reason at the very high numbers, I got some sort of specialty U.S. channel (TLC maybe?) that was carrying it (with fairly stupid commentary, but at least I got the visuals). I woke my friend up as requested when Wills and Harry left the palace and all went well. We watched up to the balcony kiss, while ordering breakfast via room service, and made it to work on time. I was extremely tired that day, but I'll always remember how much fun it was watching it with L. and discussing it ad nauseum with my other good girlfriends on that road trip.

Okay, what does this have to do with my knitting? Well, do you remember a few days later, Kate was seen shopping at Sainsburys wearing this?

That shawl inspired many knitters to get busy. There are lots of patterns out there, but I loved the one by Vancouver designer Cat Wong, entitled The Milk Run Shawl. It's a free pattern but she had the terrific and appropriate idea of asking instead for a donation to a local food bank, which I was more than happy to do. The pattern is great - full of options for creating something slightly different versions - and full of good tips and funny instructions (the last one is to brush your hair until it shines before wearing it). You can get the pattern here. I chose to knit mine in a Donegal tweed, more olive-green-brown than Kate's version, and I was a bit worried about whether it would drape as nicely, but I'm very happy with how it turned out. I like to wear it around my shoulders when I'm reading at night in bed. It was my first time doing ruffles (which go on FOREVER) but it was exciting when it all came together.

Chic Classics. . .

2011-12-13T21:50:00.002-05:00

I'm always intrigued and delighted by those publishers who spend the time re-inventing the look of the classics, using ingenious design to make them irresistible objects of beauty to collect and treasure and sometimes just to drool over. Penguin, Persephone, New Directions, Dalkey Archive, Everyman, New York Review of Books, and Melville House's Neversink Library are all great investors in keeping these fabulous books alive along with many others, and I think their importance will only grow in this e-book era.

The French occasionally get in the act too, despite the fact that so many of their books seem to consist of endless rows of uniform cream covers with only type on the front. A couple of years ago I walked into a French bookstore in Ottawa and was drawn to a series of paperback classics published by Gallimard's Folio imprint that were housed in these wonderfully textured slipcases. Despite the fact that I read French very, very slowly, I was hooked and came home with several of them.

I just couldn't resist the flocked velvet of Romain Gary's La vie devant soi or the perfect subway tile design etched into the cardboard of Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le métro. Aren't they gorgeous? They are so much fun to fondle.

Well Folio has done it again. Earlier this fall, I came across these two books:

Both the slipcases are smooth but look closely - can you see the metal bookmarks attached to the slipcases magnetically? Let me pull them away for you.

Is this not one of the most beautiful packaging ideas you've ever seen? They simply scream "buy me". So I did. And of course I have the best intentions of spending the time to improve my French by reading them one day. Or at least making liberal use of the bookmarks.

Locks and the Three Hats. . .

2011-12-12T21:22:00.001-05:00

Hats and I just don't get along. I think it has something to do with the fact that I have bangs and usually have my hair up in a ponytail, neither of which is conducive to a really good hat look. But I live in Canada and it gets bloody cold in the winter. So I'm on a quest to knit the perfect hat even though I still shudder when I think of my first attempt. It looked like this:

It's now a lovely felted bowl.

I've improved my knitting skills over the last year and it was time to plunge into headgear again. I found this pattern I quite liked from Classic Elite Yarns called the Kumera Diamond Cap. And the pattern was just for one size. And I took the time to do a gauge swatch which I obviously didn't do for my first attempt. And it was fine for the horizontal measurement, but fell a bit short vertically. What do you do in such a case? I pressed on. And here it is - it's a very pretty pattern and was quite fun to knit.

But . . . it's a wee bit too loose on my head. You can't see it in the picture but there is an inch or so of ribbing at the edge. I KNOW I should have knitted this with smaller needles but I didn't have the right size handy and so I didn't. It does sit on my head while walking, and it's a good fall hat, and as long as a gust of wind doesn't come along or I shake my head violently, it usually stays on. Maybe I need to find some discreet hair clips to hold it on in the way that women used to use their hatpins. Does anyone do this with knitted caps? Or do they just knit them to a perfect size? I keep gazing at women wearing handknit hats on the subway and I'm guessing it's the latter. Sigh.

I've been reading a lot of knitting books and blogs and certain legendary names in the knit world come up all the time. One of them is Barbara G. Walker and I recently bought her book Knitting From The Top.

Someday I will be using her techniques to knit a sweater, but she also writes about knitting a hat from the top down so that you can stop and measure it as you go. Terrific, I thought, and cast on. Now, there's no specific pattern - you just start with 8 stitches and increase on a regular basis until you've knitted to the circumference of your crown and then you continue making a type of tube until it's as long as you want. Here's the problem though: holding a circle of knitting on the top of your head as you gaze into the mirror on the bathroom cabinet, what exactly constitutes your crown? Well, here's my second attempt:

I really liked the wool (Cascade Quattro for the grey/white blend and Cascade 220 for the brim) and the way the two went together (and this time I DID use smaller needles for the ribbing) and I was quite chuffed to be doing this without consulting a pattern. But . . . it's a wee bit too big. I should have stopped increasing about 3 rows before I actually did. It does work in a pinch, but I'm just not satisfied. I'll probably rip it apart and start again some day but I just can't bring myself to do it right now. Sigh.

Undeterred, having bought a skein of lovely, bulky Cascade Lana Grande, I cast on again from the top. This would make a really warm woollen winter hat. Though it's much thicker than the wool used for Hat #2, I did measure where I should have stopped increasing on that hat, and so my "crown" was much smaller.

And it was all going really well and I bound off and ran excitedly to the mirror and pulled it onto my head and . . . the bind off row was so, so, tight it left a huge mark on my forehead even after stretching it. I was ready to cry at this point. But I took a deep breath, thought for a bit, and carefully ripped out the bind-off row. I got bigger needles and bound off much more loosely and ran back to the mirror. . . and . . . IT FITS! It's warm and cozy and covers my ears and though next time, I think I'd do away with the three garter horizontal rows that I added on a whim, IT WILL DO FOR NOW!

I think hats are now out of my system until the next time. And I still don't really like them.

An Elementary Country House Murder. . .

2011-12-12T09:55:00.000-05:00

It may be due to all the Terence Rattigan that I've been exposed to recently, but this weekend I just wanted to continue spending more time with the Brits. So I picked up Gladys Mitchell's Watson's Choice, a Mrs. Bradley mystery originally published in 1955 and recently brought back into print by Vintage U.K. It's in the cozy mode of British crime writing centered around a group of eccentric but coolly detached suspects gathered in a large country house. Sir Bohun Chantrey is a huge Sherlock Holmes enthusiast and so throws a costume party with guests dressed as characters from the cases, complete with party games that call upon their knowledge of Conan Doyle's work. Then all of a sudden the "Hound of the Baskervilles" shows up, and even though the murder - of Linda Campbell, the vampish governess recently engaged to Chantrey - takes place several weeks after the party, this large dog proves to be one of the clues to catching the culprit.

This is the second of Mitchell's extensive list of Mrs. Bradley mysteries that I've read and while I find her plots rather thin, she makes up for it with a sly humour occasioned by Bradley's forthright psychological insights and the banter between herself and Laura her secretary. I probably would have enjoyed it more if I was acquainted with a greater number of the Sherlock Holmes stories, but I didn't find it too much of a distraction. And when you get to the end, don't forget to reflect on the book's title.

Cast On and In Colour. . .

2011-12-08T11:42:00.000-05:00

I spend about two hours each day commuting because I live in mid-town Toronto but work in Mississauaga. Fortunately it's only one long bus ride, preceded by a 15 minute walk that conveniently goes by at least three good places to pick up a latte. But I really don't mind the travelling because my latest daily obsession is listening to podcasts and what better place than on the bus?

I've just recently discovered Cast On and am really enjoying it. Yes, it's a knitting podcast. It's created by Brenda Dayne, an American knitter and designer who moved to the Welsh countryside over a decade ago, and along with playing some really great music, she recounts her adventures with her craft (she spins and dyes as well as knits), has interviews and guest pieces by other knitters, muses on how knitting can encompass a whole life philosophy, and generally lets listeners eavesdrop on her little corner of the world. She frequently makes me laugh and thus I generally arrive at work in a good mood. I started with some of her latest episodes and then went back right to the beginning in 2005 and am listening to them in order, one on the way to work and one on the way home. So far I've encountered everything from an audio essay on the sounds of wool (I know I'm strange, but I can listen to sheep baas endlessly), to an interview with an Oxford zoologist on silk spun by tropical spiders, to a very funny piece about a men's knitting club stressed out with all the xmas gifts they have to complete. It's also SO comforting to know that even experienced knitters still have meltdowns, still have to rip back hours and hours of work, and it's all okay. Shownotes, photos and links to the things she discusses are always added on her blog/website located here.

One of the things Brenda also does on this podcast is to review knitting books and this is how I heard about Lorna Miser's The Knitter's Guide to Hand-Dyed and Variegated Yarn, published last year. I promptly got my hands on a copy and spent hours last night delightedly pouring over it.

My grandmother taught me to knit - just the basics - when I was quite young, and over the years, I've occasionally picked up the needles and done the odd very simple project. A garter stitch scarf was pretty much the extent of my talents. The "wow" moment that really got me determined to improve my knitting skills came - like many knitters, I'm guessing - when I first encountered a stitch dictionary. My mind boggled at how several hundred patterns could be created just by knitting or purling in different combinations. Well, the beauty of Miser's book is that it's essentially a stitch dictionary but especially for variegated yarns - those balls of gorgeous combined colours that suck me in everytime I visit a yarn store. I'm always buying them for my stash and then I never know what to do with them, since I'm really not that interested in knitting socks - yet!

I love, love this book and I have several swatches excitedly knitted last night to prove it. Miser explains how to categorize all the different types of variegated yarns - machine produced and hand dyed- and to separate them into "calm" and "active" colourways, and then each succeeding chapter shows you different techniques to combine them in your knitting, whether by adding complimentary solids or using patterns that will highlight (or minimize) the colour striping or pooling, or adding different textures into the mix. There are 65 stitch patterns and 20 projects for using them - two of which have immediately gone to the top of my future project pile.

Noro - here I come!

Next in the Neversink Library Challenge: The President. . .

2011-12-07T14:14:00.064-05:00

I've been a little remiss on my latest ongoing reading challenge but I DO mean to tackle all of The Neversink Library even though they are coming fast and furious from Melville House. Still, I mean to persevere because I absolutely trust their editorial eye. I've just finished my third book: Georges Simenon's The President, translated by Daphne Woodward. You don't have to twist my arm to get me to read a new Simenon, particularly one of his romans dur, and I hope to see more pop up in Neversink. This novel is very different in subject matter from The Train, which I reviewed here, but like all the Simenons that I have read, it carries his trademark creation of gloomy, somewhat existential atmosphere, iresistably entwined with an almost effortless suspense. I use the term effortless in conjuction with Simenon's literary skill, because the suspense never seems to be overly contrived. He just has a wonderful way of slowly building up the reader's interest in how events will unfold that sometimes even surpasses that of the characters directly involved. And somehow the endings always manage to both surprise and yet perfectly suitable and satisfying.

In this case, it's an 82 year old man, the former Premier of France, who sits in his Louis-Philippe chair by the fire, listening to the latest political news on the radio and reflecting on his life and past career. That's the plot in a nutshell. But there is SO much more going on. There has been a political crisis and a coalition govenment has been formed, led by one Chalamont, a former colleague who used to work under the Premier before getting embroiled in a scandal. The Premier has evidence that would be extremely damaging. He sits in his chair as the wind howls outside and the electricty threatens to fail and he waits for Chalamont to pay a visit. An assortment of employees - paid for by the government - hover suspiciously around him. His health may or may not, be dangerously weakening. And why does an old contemporary from the Premier's village keep calling to reassure him that he'll be at his funeral?

Simenon's characters often fantasize about living a different life; in this novel, the life is re-examined along with the process of creating parallel interpretations with the benefit of hindsight tempered with regrets and grudges. It's a no less poignant - if occasionally futile - exercise, both to undertake and to read about.

My Weekend With Terence. . .

2011-12-05T13:12:00.001-05:00

Friday night I went to see the new movie, My Week With Marilyn, directed by Simon Curtis, about a young assistant's infatuation with Marilyn Monroe during the shoot in England of The Prince and the Showgirl, written by Terence Rattigan, based on his play The Sleeping Prince. Though the story is slight, I really enjoyed the movie, both for Michelle Williams' mermerizing performance, the atmospheric soundtrack, and for the wonderful cast of British theatrical royalty that peppers the film. Kenneth Branagh has a large and juicy part as Laurence Olivier (and wouldn't it be ironic if this was the part that won him an Oscar?) and the great Judi Dench plays Sybil Thorndike. But in one delightful cameo appearance after another, up pop Michael Kitchen, Dougray Scott (excellent as Arthur Miller), Simon Russell Beale and Derek Jacobi. Tiny roles, but they kept me thoroughly engrossed. Dominic Cooper and Emma Watson round out the cast.

By coincidence, I had stopped off at Bay Street Video en route to the cinema - always a dangerous detour as I am a hopeless DVD addict. And yes, I had to control myself and put back several new releases. But there was one I couldn't resist - The Terence Rattigan Collection, recently released by the BBC. Terence Davies' new adaptation of Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea was my favourite film at TIFF and so I HAD to buy this five disc collection of television adaptations of several of his plays from the last few decades. Ensconced on the sofa with a pot of tea and my knitting, I watched five of them this weekend, one after the other. I just couldn't stop myself - the casts were just superb.

I started with my favourite Rattigan play, After the Dance, one of the most moving plays I've ever experienced about the inter-war generation. Gemma Jones was excellent as Joan, the party-going wife who has to watch her husband succumb to a younger and idealistic Imogen Stubbs. Then it was on to Ian Holm, Judi Dench (wonderfully acid and bitchy) and a young Michael Kitchen in The Browning Version. Penelope Wilton gave every bit as good and poignant a performance as Rachel Weisz, in The Deep Blue Sea with Colin Firth here as her younger lover. By this time I was quite emotionally drained, so thank god for the fun and farce of French Without Tears with a fetching Anthony Andrews (not far off his Brideshead Revisited days) and the lovely and flirtatious Nicola Paget (remember Elizabeth from Upstairs Downstairs?). And you'll barely recognize a slim and dashing Michael Gambon as a befuddled sea captain. This was followed by Geraldine McEwan and Eric Porter in Separate Tables. I have the 1958 Deborah Kerr and David Niven movie version in my collection, but the play was originally designed to have the same actors play the main characters in both story lines, and this is what occurs in the BBC version with McEwan and Porter also taking on the roles played by Rita Hayworth and Burt Lancaster. Terrific stuff - I still have 2 discs to go, including Sean Connery taking on Alexander the Great in Adventure Story. Honestly, this would make a great Christmas gift for any theatre buff on your list or a fan of any of the above actors. I'm so thrilled the BBC is going through their archives and releasing this gems - the picture quality of everything I've seen so far in this collection has been as excellent as the acting.

Now I suppose I should round out my Rattigan revivial and rent The Prince and the Showgirl, a film I've never seen. Actually I'm thinking a Marilyn Monroe marathon might soon be in the works.

Sneak Peek. . . .

2011-12-01T12:38:00.000-05:00

It's been a very busy time. I've been knitting like crazy on far too many projects with xmas coming up, and prepping for sales conference for our summer 2012 books which means dipping into as many manuscripts as I can, and then desperately trying to find the time to finish them all. I can't really talk about them in detail at this point except to tease; suffice it to say there are some really great books coming out next year. I'm loving The Chemistry of Tears, the new novel by Peter Carey. Novels by several of my favourite writers - John Irving, Toni Morrison, Helen Dunmore, John Lanchester, Philippe Claudel, Tessa Hadley - are beckoning. There are lots of novels about the endless blunderings of love (there's a real trend in exploring the complications of the menage a trois - and not just from the French either!) that will make for tantalizing summer reading. There are some really exciting debuts,, and some award winning international literature that's finally been translated along with tantalizing classics that have been out of print for too long. My favourite title of the summer comes from the former category: Life is Short and Desire Endless by Patrick Lapeyre, translated by Adriana Hunter. It won the Prix Femina in 2010. I've halfway through and it's very entertaining. There's also an incredible line-up of mystery novels to look forward to.

In the meantime, all the "best of 2011 lists" are coming out. I look at them with professional interest, but I much prefer it when they ask writers themselves to recommend their favourite reads. As they did in The Guardian here. Some great xmas ideas. As I do every year, I'll be going over my reading/movie journal and picking my top ten soon, but since I'll get a lot of reading (and film viewing) done over the holidays it's still a bit premature.

One For The Sweet Tooth. . .

2011-11-24T14:12:00.047-05:00

One of my weaknesses is definitely the marshmallow. I once had dreams of opening up The MarshMellow Cafe, a place devoted to hot chocolate, s'mores and rice crispy squares, and where urban dwellers could gather around a roaring fireplace and roast their marshmallows all year round without worrying about mosquitos. Then someone pointed out that it would never pass fire codes. Oh well, another dream dashed.

So you can understand why I got excited about the latest recipe posted by Smitten Kitchen for Sweet Potato and Marshmallow Biscuits. Take a look - honestly, they look really good!

My favourite marshmallows in Toronto are the passionfruit ones made by Bobbette & Belle located in Leslieville. Their toasted coconut ones are also delicious (not to mention their cupcakes and lemon meringue tarts). If you order a hot chocolate they will toast a marshmallow with a blowtorch and add it on top. Brilliant.

When a Great Story Calls. . .

2011-11-23T13:30:00.000-05:00

     It's getting chilly and A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness is the perfect one-sitting read on a couch, huddled under a blanket with a cup of tea close by.  Reading this amazing book full of thrilling writing and storytelling, I really felt transported to my younger bookworm self. The kid in me was scared and seduced; the adult in me was an emotional wreck by the end.
     Conor is a thirteen year old going through a tough time. His mother is getting treatments for her cancer and doesn't seem to be getting any better, his father has moved to the U.S. with his new wife and baby, he's getting bullied at school and his brash and opinionated grandmother is coming to stay. Worse of all are the nightmares he keeps having. One of them involves the yew tree he can see outside his window. This tree turns into a raging monster at night, breaking windows to enter his room and insisting that he will tell Conor three tales. After he's finished he promises that Conor will have to tell one of his own, whether he wants to or not. Conor wakes up convinced it's all a dream. Until he sees that his floor is covered with a carpet of the tree's needles. . .
     I'm not going to reveal anything further except to say that the monster's stories have wonderfully unexpected and ambiguous endings. I love books that challenge the reader's imagination without being overly didactic. This is also a gorgeously designed book with menacing illustrations used to great effect by Jim Kay. Make sure you take the dust jacket off if you get your hands on a copy. The book was "inspired" by Siobhan Dowd, a favourite YA author of mine (her novel A Swift Pure Cry is terrific) and there's an added layer of sadness that she died - also from cancer - before she could write this last book. Patrick Ness has paid an excellent tribute to her.

A Must Have. . .

2011-11-17T14:15:00.000-05:00

Lusting after this. Table of contents located here.

The Grass is Always Greener. . .

2011-11-16T14:09:00.085-05:00

Westwood is completely different from Stella Gibbons' classic novel Cold Comfort Farm, but it is still an enjoyable read; the wit is less employed (though very welcome when it is) and the subject matter and main character more sober in outlook and temperment, but Gibbons has still crafted an original and unusual book populated by a wacky set of characters. There may be nothing nasty in the woodshed but there's certainly a lot of uncomfortableness in both Westwoods, two dissimilar houses in different parts of London representing two possible (and fantastical) options for Margaret Steggles, a plain, bookish schoolteacher, only twenty-three but resigned to the fact that she will probably never get married. She is an observer more than an object of attention, a woman, "still far from the peace of middle age, which has learned to enjoy gardening more than people, and people were what interested her, not wheelbarrows and secateurs."

This 1946 novel is set mostly in London during the blackouts of the Second World War, which intrudes periodically but stays mostly in the background. Margaret lives with her parents - an opinionated and bitter mother, and her frequently absent father who likes to escapes his unhappy home life by having affairs. Margaret too longs to flee permanently and she enviously eyes both Westwoods. One is a sickly sweet house in the suburbs belonging to her father's friend Dick Fletcher, who has a young daughter "not quite like other children", who needs looking after when his housekeeper is hurt in a raid. The other is the far grander Westwood of famous playright Gerald Challis, father-in-law to a famous painter and grandfather to three children that Margaret also gets saddled with taking care of. He too has a roving eye and it doesn't alight on Margaret but on her best friend, the vivacious Hilda who knows him only under an assumed name after a chance meeting in the fog.

The world swirls energetically around Margaret as she longs for a more interesting life and I will admit to being frustrated around the middle of the novel with her refusal to see how easily she's taken advantage of by selfish people that don't deserve her adulation, much less respect. But I was still intrigued to see how Gibbons would resolve the story and I'm glad I stuck with it. This is not the WWII London of Patrick Hamilton or Elizabeth Bowen, Sarah Waters' Night Watch or Mary Wesley's The Camomile Lawn, but Westwood shares that universal search for happiness and human connection, made more urgent during war - at least in this case - by the drabness of the homefront and the narrowing options for husbands, deceivers as they may be. If there's a message - and this pops up in a lot of women's fiction from this period - it's to find your own type of happiness that doesn't necessarily rely on the opinions of others.

I'm glad this novel was brought back into print. Vintage UK have also released Gibbons' Starlight, Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, and Christmas At Cold Comfort Farm. I'll also have to get a copy of Nightingale Wood, re-issued two years ago by Virago.

Lest We Forget. . .

2011-11-11T10:30:00.000-05:00

Today I'm going to start reading The Beauty and The Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War by Peter Englund, translated by Peter Graves. It's the history of twenty ordinary people during the war but with a real international perspective that I think will be illuminating, thought-provoking and unlike any other history of the war that I have read. Dwight Garner has a review here in the New York Times in which he notes that the book, "has the most devastating ending I can remember in a piece of nonfiction".

Into the Brilliance. . .

2011-11-10T11:58:00.002-05:00

It's been a magnificent week so far for filling my head with awe and admiration for some of Canada's incredible writers and thinkers. On Monday night, I headed over to Wade Davis's event at the Toronto Public Library. His new book Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest is definitely in my top 10 books of the year. He's an incredible speaker and accompanied by a slide show, he really brought the stories of the twenty-six men who were part of the Everest expeditions in 1921-1924 to life, particularly the horrors they'd suffered in the First World War. The book is incredibly detailed and researched (he's been working on it for over ten years) but after hearing him speak, it's clear that his mission was to really honour the incredible lives of these men, each of whom could have had a biography all to themselves; attempting to climb Everest in many cases was the least of their accomplishments. The grandson of Arthur Wakefield, a military doctor on the expedition who had spent a number of years in Canada working in the isolated communities of Newfoundland and Labrador, was in attendance and he brought a pair of thick mittens and Wakefield's wooden ice pick/pole that had gone to Everest with him. I got to handle the latter and it gave me goosebumps. Wakefield's story is really heartbreaking; he was working in a casualty station just behind the front lines during the Battle of the Somme where the Newfoundland regiment - many of whom he knew personally - was decimated during that horrific day.

Davis, who holds the wonderful title of Explorer-In-Residence for the National Geographic Society, also wanted to tell the story from the Tibetan point of view and he spent a couple of months living and researching in Tibet. It's as much a book about the arrogance of British imperialism as it is about exploration and the post-war culture of England. And yes, even the Bloomsbury set shows up. What I found engrossing about the talk was Davis' excitement at the strange turns his research took him. After all, this is definitely not the first book on George Mallory. But by delving extensively into the war records of all these men, he was able to bring new perspectives to their motivations and actions. AND he was able to unearth the diaries of Canadian surveyor Oliver Wheeler who he credits with finding the approach to Everest that the expedition eventually used. If you don't have time to read the book, you can hear the whole of his amazing talk (accompanied by slides) in three parts, Part One, Part Two and Part Three. Well worth a listen.

Have you been listening to this year's Massey Lectures by Adam Gopnik ? (American born, but Canadian raised, so I'll claim him for this country). His theme is Winter: Five Windows on the Season and while I've only heard three of the lectures so far, I know I'll definitely be buying the book. Tuesday's lecture on Radical Winter and the culture of the polar expeditions, from the race across the Arctic of Frankenstein and his monster, to Apsley Cherry-Gerard's The Worst Journey in the World, was fascinating, particularly in light of thinking about how heroism and exploration changed between those Antarctic journeys of Scott and Shackleton, and the Everest attempts outlined by Davis just a decade later, but with the horrors of the First World War sandwiched in between. Davis notes interestingly, that several survivors of Shackleton's trip actually applied to join the Everest expedition; others of course had enlisted and been killed in the trenches.

I think I need to go and buy Davis's The Wayfarers, his 2009 Massey Lectures. Heck, in honour of the 50th anniversary I should go back and read them all.

Loving Online Magazines. . .

2011-11-09T09:56:00.019-05:00

The latest edition of Five Dials, the literary magazine published by Hamish Hamilton, has landed in my inbox and it's filled with all sorts of goodies. You can sign up here and it's free. This issue has a number of writers looking at London in light of its Occupy Movement, including a piece by Daniel Swift that reflects on Virginia Woolf's journal entries during the Blitz. There are also some great reading suggestions and excerpts from favourite books recommended by musicians, including a cookbook (in which you'll find out which vegetables to eat if you are angry and tense, and which to eat if you want to fuel productive creativity) and a funny piece that made me laugh, titled "The Needle and the Damage Done: What Is The Best Title For a Book On Knitting?" in which Jenny Lord, author of The Purls of Wisdom, enlisted the help of other writers in choosing a suitable title. I like "The Yarn and the Restless" and "Knit Gonna Happen" myself.

Another online magazine that I love to read is Covet Garden which focuses on home design and features really beautiful homes of ordinary and creative people in Toronto. You can subscribe, again for free, here. They also have a blog that showcases local designers such as Toronto artist Julie Moon who created this gorgeous ceramic poppy pin. Read more about her at this post.

November Knitting Books. . .

2011-11-08T00:01:00.006-05:00

Today sees the release of Vogue Knitting by Art Joinnides. I had access to an early copy and have been browsing through this for the last two weeks. While most of the patterns call for far more experience than my knitting skills, it's still a fascinating look through the last thirty years of knitted fashions. There are 80 patterns taken from the magazine and each is accompanied by an overview of the themes and ideas behind each issue. And I've definitely added the challenge of completing one of these patterns to the bucket list.

This month also sees the release of Melissa Leapman's Stashbuster Knits which I've really enjoyed reading through because who doesn't have a stash of yarn crying out to be used? I like her colour wheel tips and the fact that her projects are divided by yarn weight. They are very doable projects as well, including a short cardi made from bulky wool that I'm going to attempt, and I also like the wrap shown on the cover which cleverly uses the yarn ends as fringe so no weaving is involved. Brilliant idea.

2012 IMPAC Longlist Announced. . .

2011-11-07T10:28:00.002-05:00

The incredibly long longlist (147 titles) for the 2012 IMPAC award has been announced. Nominated by librarians, this is an award that I always look forward to as it usually produces a very worthy winner and has personally introduced me to the writing of Per Petterson and Gerbrand Bakker. I always hope to have read at least ten titles on the list; I'm doing well this year with having read fourteen, and of those, I'd cast my vote for David Grossman's To The End of The Land , translated by Jessica Cohen which I was delighted to see was nominated by the Toronto Public Library, or The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Polly Mclean, both very powerful and emotional books about the long-term effects of war. You can see the full longlist by title here or by nominating library here.

Fall Back. . .

2011-11-06T21:46:00.001-05:00

How did you spend your extra hour today? My friend K. and I went for a long walk in Toronto's ravines enjoying the mild weather, lovely sunshine, fall colours and the crisp leaves scrunching under our feet.

But all roads these days seem to lead me to French pastry! I'm greedily devouring Pastry Paris: In Paris, Everything Looks Like Dessert by Susan Hochbaum. She's cleverly travelled around the city photographing famous buildings and beautiful architectural details along with French art and fashion, and pairing them with equally delectable shots of creative French concoctions complete with a culinary history of each. You can see a slideshow of her work here (but don't click on the link if you're hungry).

In Toronto, nothing really looks like pastry but I did my best.

If you squint a bit, these leaves look like the grapefruit slices that top this beautiful tart with Earl Grey and almond mousse, purchased at Nadege. At any rate, it was the closest I could get to edible fall colours and it was a delicious (and well earned) reward at the end of a long walk.

New Persephones! . . .

2011-11-04T12:05:00.000-04:00

It's always a special day when I open my mailbox to retrieve that white envelope from the U.K. with the newest Biannually magazine from Persephone Books. I've been collecting and reading their beautiful books for ten years now (I so admire their committment to keeping every title in print), and I'm lusting after their latest. In particular, I really want to read No Surrender by Constance Maud, a suffragette novel first published in 1911 that covers multiple aspects of the movement and includes a character based on Lady Constance Lytton. Persephone has dug up a review of the book by Emily Davison, the woman who fatally threw herself under a horse to bring attention to suffrage, in which she writes, ". . . but for vivid realism, the pictures of prison life, of the Hunger Strike and Forcible Feeding, are difficult to beat. It is a book which breathes the very spirit of our Women’s Movement."

And isn't the fabric for the endpapers and accompanying bookmark wonderful? It's a pattern designed in 1913 by the Omega Workshops run by Roger Fry and in the suffragette colours. Hmmm - it would make a great scarf wouldn't it?

Their second book for the season is Greenbanks by their favourite author Dorothy Whipple. I'm a bit behind in my Whipplewending; I've read and loved Somewhere From a Distance but the others are still waiting patiently on my shelf. However, Greenbanks is the story of an ordinary English family both before and after the First World War, and that immediately piques my interest.

Finally, Persephone continues to bring back into print some wonderful cookbooks. Dinner for Beginners by Rachel and Margaret Ryan was first published in 1934 and contains 109 recipes and 28 menus to cook dinners for four people.

The bookmark I received with the magazine (this gorgeous fabric designed by Duncan Grant) had a snippet on the back in which the authors take you minute by minute through the cooking process telling you exactly when to complete each step. Now, I've never actually attempted any recipes from my Persephone cookbooks, but oh, how I love to read them! They are endlessly entertaining, and so evocative of the historical period in which they were written. Kitchen Essays by Agnes Jekyll remains one of my favourite Persephones.

I'll be going to London next month and will definitely be stopping by their lovely store to pick these up along with Midsummer Night in the Workhouse, a collection of short stories by Diana Athill, and The Sack of Bath by Adam Ferguson. That should bring my collection up to date and provide some wonderful holiday reading.

Where There's A Wool, There's a Way. . .

2011-11-02T10:47:00.001-04:00

I love this campaign started by knitter and awesome designer Kate Davies (you need to seriously check out her blog Needled - she creates the most incredibly beautiful patterns) and Felicity Ford, to convince the fashion industry to stop marketing campaigns using the words "wool" to describe products that actually have very little wool content in them. You can see some examples in her post here. You can sign a petition here advocating that garments should not be called "wool" unless wool actually makes up more than 50% of the content. But Wovember is also a month long celebration of sheep, wool and the history of textiles and knitting. The idea is to wear something every day this month that is made out of 100% wool. You can also enter a photography contest celebrating sheep or all things woolly, open to anyone in the world. Details are here and the prize (of course) is some pretty luscious Shetland wool!

Ambition, Folly, Originality: Fascinating Women. . .

2011-11-01T08:47:00.000-04:00

There are so many interesting fall books landing in the office these days; Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson by Susan Hertog, is one of them. There was a time when I was completely enamoured of all things Rebecca West, working my way through her novels (The Judge, for example is quite extraordinary) and journalism, particularly during her suffrage period. I still think she's one of the greatest writers and most fascinating women of the 20th century. I know nothing at all about Dorothy Thompson but after reading the jacket flap of this biography, I can see why the author has paired these two together (beyond their friendship). Thompson, an American, was also a journalist and the first female head of a European news bureau. And as West conducted a tempestuous affair with H.G. Wells, Thompson had a similar relationship with Sinclair Lewis. Both also had troubled relationships with their sons, who were jealous of their mother's success. From Hertog's introduction:

. . . the lives of these women are important, not only in and of themselves, but because they are emblematic of female consciousness at a time of great social and moral upheaval and escalating scientific discovery - when psychological survival required the redefinition of one's relationship to oneself, society and the universe, both physical and divine. Few were up to the task, and the trajectory of most lives was an exercise in experimentation, frustration and failure. Thompson and West, however, had the extraordinary advantage of raw intelligence, along with the desire to make a difference in the world.

November also sees the publication of Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World by Richard Rhodes. I was looking through her filmography and while I don't think I've ever actually seen any of her movies, her life could be a Hollywood script. Fleeing Germany and her marriage to a Nazi arms dealer, she landed in Hollywood via 1920s Paris, and in addition to her successful career, she was also responsible for inventing technology that created a jam-proof radio guidance system for torpedos; it's also used in today's cell phones and GPS devices.

And speaking of Hollywood, though I usually shun celebrity memoirs, I'm making an exception for Diane Keaton's Then Again. I've always loved her movies and admired her original style. The focus of this memoir is really about her relationship with her mother who kept these incredibly thick journals, part scrapbook, part honest accounting of her life and thwarted ambitions, right up until she succumbed to Alzheimer's. The book is wonderfully designed (and you'll be awed when you see the photos of these journals) but I'll probably be listening to the unabridged audio which is read by Keaton herself, if only for the trademark laugh and quirky inflections.

New Literature Prize. . .

2011-10-28T13:35:00.001-04:00

It's fairly crowded in the world of literary awards; I work in the industry and even I can't keep track of them all. But according to this article in The Bookseller, The Literature Prize - started in part as a response to the Man Booker Prize allegedly too concerned with the "readability" of its shortlist - seems set for the spring of 2012. There are a few things about this award that look promising. The judges will be chosen from a group of 40 - 50 members of an academy of writers and critics who are "immersed full-time in the world of books", and founder Andrew Kidd promises that the award will, "unashamedly embrace the idea of the book as art . . . and that has to do with language, form, ideas, and storytelling, and the unity of all those things." There will also be no longlist, just a shortlist.

Bring it on.

A Whale of Inspiration. . .

2011-10-27T13:23:00.000-04:00

I love it when different art forms get inspired by one another. For example. First came a literary masterpiece, Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

Which prompted artist Matt Kish to embark on an amazing project of illustrating every page of this massive novel. It's been published by Tin House in this beautiful collection: Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing For Every Page. You can quickly see some of Kish's work on his blog here and follow the whole project here.

This then inspired designer Ann Weaver to create some knitting designs based on Kish's illustrations, which are now available in her book White Whale Volume 1. You can take a peek at the designs here. I really like the cover sweater, aptly named "The Whiteness".

Someone's probably already done this, but if I had the time (and more importantly the talent), I could get endlessly inspired to conjure up knitting patterns inspired from Virginia Woolf's work, especially To The Lighthouse. From the brown stocking Mrs. Ramsey is actually knitting, to seascapes and lighthouses, boeuf en daubes and Lily's final painting, the possibilities would be endless. And what fun you could have with Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, Between the Acts or The Waves!

My New Motto. . .

2011-10-26T08:10:00.002-04:00

Isn't this adorable? It came with a whole bunch of other labels as a bonus with the October issue of Knitting Magazine. Even though the import prices are hefty, I do love British magazines, not least because they often include goodies like this. Since knitting has been a major anti-stress reliever for me recently, this is a motto I can wholeheartedly embrace. And the issue is pretty good too, with some lovely sweater patterns.

The Big Book Is Here. . .

2011-10-25T08:17:00.002-04:00

Today sees the release of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 which I've been excited about for months now. I'm about 200 pages in and so far it's riveting. I have to warn you - the book is heavy! But despite that, you just wouldn't want to read this on an e-reader because it's really beautifully designed. When you remove the translucent jacket you get this:

And the pages inside are just as beautiful and slightly mysterious. You can see Chip Kidd talking about his design for the book here.

And do yourself a favour and pick up a copy of Leoš Janáček's Sinfonietta as it plays a recurring role in the novel. I will be happily absorbed in this for some time. . .

Adding to the Stash (The Other One). . .

2011-10-24T20:58:00.000-04:00

A funny thing happened on the way to last weekend's Creative Sewing and Needlework Festival. I was making a checklist of different yarns I needed for various upcoming projects and was prepared to stick firmly to that list. But instead, to my great surprise, my inner quilter came out, seduced by the numerous great fabrics and finished quilts on display in every row. End result - no yarn bought, but I definitely succumbed to far too many fat quarters on sale.

I wasn't completely abandoning sheep though. Look at this great fabric that I found (and no, I have no idea what I'll do with the metre that I bought, but I just couldn't resist!)

I was also really pleased to see Kallisti Quilts there. They are an online only company that specializes in really gorgeous Japanese and African fabrics, both traditional and contemporary.

I also picked up some really cool handcrafted wooded buttons from The Woodlot. And some lovely handle hardware from Quilt a Bag. But no wool. I think I might have been turned off by a rather unhappy looking alpaca that was shut up in a tiny pen on the show floor. Now if I can only find a project that combines the two crafts. I think I might be quilting a bag to hold my knitting projects in the near future. . .

A Cozy, Fun Knit. . .

2011-10-21T18:13:00.001-04:00

Brrrr - it's getting cold out. Finished this fun shawl/scarf this week and really enjoyed knitting the addictive pattern by Toronto designer Laura Chau which you can find here. The bright colours remind me of French macarons. Tomorrow I'm heading to the Creative Sewing and Needlework Festival where I'm fairly sure I'll succumb to far too many wool temptations. Still, I'm really looking forward to getting lots of inspiration. Winter's just around the corner after all!

Hooray!

2011-10-18T18:40:00.000-04:00

I'm so pleased that Julian Barnes has taken the Man Booker Prize for The Sense of An Ending - this has been one of my favourite reads all year and well deserves the honour. I think his writing has gotten better and better with each recent book. I loved Flaubert's Parrot, but the novels in between were hit and miss for me. I started reading him seriously again with his non-fiction mediation on death - Nothing to Be Frightened Of - and I loved his last collection of short stories, Pulse.

Two Great Musical Collaborations. . .

2011-10-17T22:17:00.001-04:00

I spent most of the weekend knitting, alternating between two projects that I was pretty excited about. And then on Sunday night, unhappy with the look of , and frustrated with the number of mistakes I'd made with the other, I "frogged" them both. When I first heard this term, I thought it was the knitting community being polite instead of using another "f" expletive, as in "I really F*&;%#*ed this up!" but no, it refers to tearing apart your work, i.e. "rip it, rip it". Sigh. If nothing else, knitting is teaching me lots of patience.

The other thing it allows me to do is take the time to really listen closely to CDs. While I love my iPod, I have rarely bought music from iTunes, always preferring to browse among the ever-shrinking aisles of actual CDs and loading them on afterwards. I like to look at the album artwork, stumble unexpectedly over something that looks interesting, and when I do buy a CD, I like reading the physical booklet with the lyrics and liner notes. I rarely know what I'll end up taking home and that's half the fun. And that's how I recently acquired these two really enjoyable collaborations.

I have a previous Stacey Kent CD titled Raconte-Moi which I discovered in a listening booth in a classical music shop in Oakville, and I really liked how clear she sang in French. So I already was a fan of her voice and light jazz style. Breakfast on the Morning Tram quite frankly enticed me with the song titles; it seemed to be a romantic album all about travelling. So imagine my immense delight on opening the accompanying booklet to discover that the lyricist on four of the songs is none other than Kazuo Ishiguro! Now I shouldn't be too surprised that he has a musical yen - his last collection of short stories, Nocturnes, were all centered around a musical theme. And in his lyrics, he continues to tell stories. "The Ice Hotel" is about a couple who reject the tropics for their holiday in favour of an ice hotel because they really need to talk about their relationship. "I Wish I Could Go Travelling Again" is about a woman yearning for the joys of travel but knowing that if she does, it will only lead to painful memories. "Breakfast on the Morning Tram" is an almost surreal song about a city tram that serves a full buffet breakfast and cures a broken heart as well. And in "So Romantic", a woman regretfully remembers how she and her previous lover would disagree on what was really romantic. The music, by Jim Tomlinson, is reminiscent of those great songs from the 1920s or 30s. Ironically, he did not write the lyrics to the song "Never Let Me Go", which I like to think has been included because Stacey Kent has a wicked sense of humour. It's a really lovely album - wistful, playful, joyful - and I hope Ishiguro continues with this second career.

And then there is Hush, a terrific pairing of Bobby McFerrin with Yo-Yo Ma as the two cover a lot of different musical styles from classical to lullaby to even a hoedown. Their rendition of "Ave Maria" is incredible - hearing McFerrin's soaring voice is really akin to listening to something very special and almost sacred.

Icelandic Mysteries. . .

2011-10-12T20:21:00.007-04:00

I started Arnaldur Indridason's latest, Outrage, translated by Anna Yates, on the train home from Ottawa. He's one of my favourite Scandinavian crime writers and I like his tightly plotted police proceedures. I thought this would be another Inspector Erlendur mystery, but it follows on from the last book, Hypothermia; at the end of that case, Erlendur took some time off and went away to the Eastern fjords, where his younger brother went missing in a snowstorm decades ago. This event has always haunted him, especially as the body was never found.

So the latest murder case in Reykjavik falls to his colleague Elinborg to solve. A man has been found with his throat slit and the date-rape drug Rohypnol in his pockets. A subsequent autopsy reveals that the murdered man's body was also full of the drug. Elinborg has to use old fashioned detective work to discover potential witnesses and to track down possible victims of the man, all the while trying to balance her duties as wife (and main family cook) and mother of three. Which makes a refreshing change from the usual moody, male detective who rarely has mundane parental chores to occupy his mind. Elinborg worries about everything from her son's obsession with his blog, to guilt over not being at home to help her daughter's knitting assignment (and isn't it great that Icelandic kids have to knit as part of their schooling?). And she hates having to answer her work cell phone when she's at home. But she's tough and diligent at her job, and not above firmly reprimanding a colleague when he screws up. The case veers into many lines of investigation including the unsolved murder of a young girl several years ago. Elinborg's patience, cleverness and expertise with Indian spices - she's also a published cookbook author - solve most of the mysteries.

But we're left hanging as to the whereabouts of Erlendur. Elinborg gets a call informing her that his car has been abandoned and there's been no sight of him. Will we find out what happened in the next book, or will he become a missing persons case himself (obsessed as he is by this type of mystery)? Indridason may be turning his focus to Elinborg which would be just fine by me as I really liked her as a character. I do worry about Erlendur though and hope he's safe.

A Lovely Visit to Ottawa or Things You Can't Get in Toronto. . .

2011-10-09T18:10:00.000-04:00

Took the train up to Ottawa at the end of last week for a brief work jaunt. It's a city that grows on me each time I visit. I love all the bike trails (and they now have a barricaded bike lane on Laurier - similar to some of the lanes they've installed in Montreal), and it's such a pretty city to walk around, particularly in the fall and especially with the gorgeous weather we've been having recently.

As with any travel destination, I'm always drawn to shops and restaurants that aren't available in my home city. On this trip, I booked a later train home to give me some extra free time, and I'm afraid I over-indulged in some retail therapy. Here are just a few haunts I like in the nation's capital city.

Places to Eat:
Best place to go for breakfast: The Scone Witch (love their lemon poppyseed and their herb & onion scones - I always get extra for the train ride home.)

Favourite place to pick up a latte: Ottawa's local chain Bridgehead (they also have a awesome lemon scone - can you sense a theme here?)

Favourite Thai Restaurant: Khao Thai. They have a really yummy appetizer platter of satay chicken, spring rolls and minced pork served on orange slices. I also like their peanut sauce and their pad thai which is not bright orange.

New Favourite Restaurant: Zen Kitchen. This was my first ever all-vegan meal and it was delicious. So many interesting flavour combinations.

Unique stores to check out:
Cool clothing: Roadtrip Always something original and fun to see.

Housewares and gifts: Zone (they also have great costume jewelry and awesome bags - I've been looking for a new fall bag in an earthy tone and found this great two-in-one number. They can be used separately, or the smaller one attaches on the inside of the larger, allowing for important things to be enclosed with a zipper and other miscellany - knitting, a book - to be shoved down around it. It's the perfect size - I really love it!)

French books: Librairie du Soleil. Located in the Market, I always pop in for a browse. I like to see the different covers on the French editions of books I've read, and in my unending optimism that I'll make the time to improve my French, I usually end up buying something. This trip, I found two beautifully packaged classics - the subject for another blog post once I get my camera sorted.

Yarn: Of course I have to check out local yarn stores and I really like Yarn Forward in the Glebe area. I found some gorgeous chunky wool in a deep red colour and bought all four skeins that they had. Started my first sweater on the train ride home and have now run out with only 60% completed. I'm hoping I can find more here in Toronto and the search will start in earnest next week. I've modified a simple pattern and added some extra texture. It may all prove to be quite daft - I'll have to see how it looks when it's done. But it's been a lot of fun to knit.

Picked up some magazines, CDs and a summery shirt on sale as well - I was really quite bad. Ah well, it's all out of my system now. . .

France's Bad Boy Takes On The Art World

2011-10-05T09:47:00.001-04:00

The Guardian an interesting review of Michel Houellebecq's new novel The Map and the Territory , translated by Gavin Bowd, which has just been published in the U.K. (It'll be out in Canada in January). The focus of the review is about the novel's satire of the contemporary art world, but what intrigues me the most is its mention of one of the themes being the cult of the French countryside being manipulated by Michelin. The main character is an artist who uses Michelin road maps in his work. I've never read Houellebecq before, but this novel did win the Prix Goncourt last year, so this may be the book to start with. Above is the North American cover, but I'm drawn more to the U.K. cover - don't you just want to start popping that bubblewrap?

A Perfect Pairing. . .

2011-10-01T09:42:00.013-04:00

Caught a wonderful production of Private Lives at the Royal Alexandra Theatre this week, directed by Richard Eyre. This is one of my favourite plays and I've seen a couple of other Canadian productions, all good in their varying interpretations. Brian Bedford played a very world-weary Elyot in 2001 at Stratford against a sophisticated Seana McKenna. I adored a CanStage production a few years before that with Albert Schultz (very bemused) up against a deliciously sleek and snarling Brenda Robbins - I still remember her arm coming out of the pile of cushions at the start of the second act and the use of a fountain on the famous balcony scene was a splendid touch.

I equally loved this pairing of Paul Gross and Kim Cattrall. Gross was a sexy, impatient and exasperated Elyot, almost Cary Grant-like, which was perfectly matched to Cattrall's Amanda, alternating cool blondness with raging physicality. And let's face it - she looked amazing in those sleek gowns and even just wrapped in a towel. The set was creative and original, especially in the second act, with its interesting use of circular and goldfish motifs and the actors really used the space well and to comic effect. I think actors in a Coward play often rush through the text, but not these two who found interesting intonations in the words, thus allowing me to listen to very familiar lines as if they were completely fresh. Great supporting work from Anna Madeley as Sybil (one of my pet peeves with this play is Sybil is often far too shrill - not in this production) and Simon Paisley Day as Victor (again, not played as a caricature, just an ordinary man completely unable to understand Amanda's vibrant personality). A few accent slips now and then, but a thoroughly enjoyable production. It's on until the end of October and well worth the ticket price!

Can't Wait For This One. . .

2011-09-30T11:29:00.001-04:00

And some great upcoming movie news. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel will be out in the spring of 2012. How can this miss with the great cast - Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Dev Patel, and Penelope Wilton. Check out the trailer above. It's based on a very funny novel I read many years ago - These Foolish Things by Deborah Maggoch - about a group of senior Brits who come to India lured by the promise of a luxury retirement home, much cheaper than anything they can afford in England, and their subsequent comic and touching adventures.

P.D. James Takes On Jane Austen. . .

2011-09-30T11:08:00.001-04:00

Here's some really exciting news for the fall season, just announced. Any new P.D. James mystery is a cause for celebration but this new crime novel is also set in the world of Pride and Prejudice, six years after Elizabeth and Darcy's marriage. The murder victim? None other than Wickham. Could this get more delicious? Death Comes to Pemberley will be out in Canada at the end of November.
Can't wait to read this!

Behind the Scenes at the Tour de France. . .

2011-09-15T14:02:00.061-04:00

So I was waiting in line getting my festival tickets and as you do, started chatting with the people around me. The guy in front had an accent so I asked him what part of England he came from.

"Well not many people know of it, it's a town called Bedford."
"Really? I just happen to be reading a book by a guy who grew up in Bedford. That's just a bit north of London isn't it?"
"Yes, about 50km. Who is the author?"
"Ned Boulting. He's a sports journalist; he's written a book about covering the Tour de France."
"Really? I went to school with a guy named Ned Boulting."

It really is a small world. When his wife returned bringing him a coffee, we also established that we'd all eaten in the same small restaurant in the suburbs of Liverpool and that we also shared a similar taste in British films, if our tickets were anything to go by.

Boulting has been covering the Tour for British television since 2003, roughly about the time I too became a fan. He and I knew very little about the intricacies of the sport - what the heck a green jersey was, how the peloton worked, and why would so many guys work so hard pulling their bodies over huge mountains to help someone else win? You learn as you go, and as things start to make sense, one slowly becomes obsessed with this gruelling and fascinating sport, even despite the constant disappointments around the constant doping scandals.

In his book How I Won the Yellow Jumper, there are reflections on, and encounters with, some of the big names of the sport - Armstrong, Wiggins, Cavendish - but this is really a look at the army of people involved behind the scenes, from the journalists and photographers, to the caterers, the hotel staff, and even the crazy fans who camp out on the mountains. They all need to eat, sleep, travel from stage to stage, do laundry, and pee; all of which produces numerous logistical conundrums and frequently amusing anecdotes. The driving in particular is a nightmare - all those narrow, steep mountain roads, with big trucks and dangerous speed demons. And then there are the challenges of interviewing a rider at the beginning of a stage and having to get to the finish line ahead of the peloton (without getting lost on the side streets). Boulting is also very funny on the difficulties he's had over the years (as most sports journalists can probably attest to) about staking out a reluctant athlete and coming up with intelligent questions beyond "How does it feel?".

What we want now, what TV demands to know, is the stuff that has remained hidden to this point, the stuff the blank stare of the lens cannot hope to unearth. The joy goes without saying; the delight is self-evident. TV wants to find out what the rider has within him: the hidden agenda, the feud resolved, maybe, the personal motivation born from some sense of grief or injustice or anger. Can the rider blurt this emotion out? Can he paint words for us all, which bring back the thrill of watching the win unfold? What can he say to make a good feeling better? And, I return to my initial question: where do I start?

This is an entertaining and informative book that could be enjoyed by someone who has never watched the Tour, or a die-hard fan glued to the TV screen for most of July.

TIFF Part 2: Two Successful Literary Adaptations. . .

2011-09-14T10:03:00.000-04:00

The last two films I saw at TIFF were completely different in style, but both were literary adaptations about how deeply and profoundly love can linger or shake us to our core. And both were very enjoyable to watch.

My favourite film of the festival so far has been Terence Davies' adaptation of Terence Rattigan's moving play The Deep Blue Sea, starring Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston and Simon Russell Beale. Weisz plays Hester, a woman who has left her husband and comfortable lifestyle after falling in love with a brash, alcoholic pilot whose best days were during the war. They live in a shabby flat and at the beginning of the film, she has just attempted suicide, caught between a lover who no longer is in love with her, and a well-meaning husband who she simply can't love or return to. I was completely absorbed in this film from the start - the performances, particularly by Weisz who is beautifully vulnerable and raw, the gorgeous set design that captures all of the post-war bleakness and especially the amazing score. Davies always knows how to use music to enhance his storytelling whether it's the soaring, emotional Violin Concerto Op.14 by Samuel Barber that he uses for the dramatic scenes (I had to go out and buy myself a CD right after the movie), or the sentimental songs sung by crowds in a pub or for comfort in a bomb shelter. I completely teared up when the the couple was dancing to Jo Stafford's rendition of "You Belong to Me". And what a treat to have Davies there, along with Weisz and Hiddleston, for the Q & A following the screening. He's such a firecracker - jumping eagerly forward on the stage to answer questions, quoting Shakespeare and generally excited to be there, having shot this on a very small budget. And here's Weisz and Hiddleston (sorry for the blurred photo - I think I was a bit excited too!)

The next night, I saw the Chilean movie Bonsái , directed by Cristián Jiménez and based on Alejandro Zamba's novella of the same name, which I had read a few years ago and admired. It's the story of a young man's first love, intensified by the books the couple reads in bed at night (despite the two having lied to each other early in the relationship about having read Proust). This relationship is retold a decade later in the novel he is writing, while pretending to his new girlfriend that it's the manuscript of a famous writer that he's just typing up. Proustian time and memory was certainly a major theme throughout, but there was also a wistful lightness to this film that was charming and humourous while also quite sad at times. It's difficult to capture the internal importance of literature and the act of reading on celluloid, but this movie tried to explore, and generally successed at capturing some of its essence. I recommend both it and the novella.

Round Trip. . .

2011-09-13T09:29:00.001-04:00

I was in Calgary on a work trip last week but managed to find time to visit two really lovely yarn stores. The Make One Yarn Studios has comfy couches and more importantly had skeins of the 8400 shade of Cascade 220 that I had just run out of, and still needed for my log cabin blocks. Hooray! I love taking knitting to the airport - it just makes the time go by so much faster. Another store I will definitely return to is the wonderfully named Pudding Yarn which had an intoxicating selection. This fall I'm completely drawn to all shades of purple and eggplant and I ended up buying a few skeins of this lovely purple tweed. I knew I immediately wanted to knit a cosy cowl.

This is the very first project I've ever completed using circular needles without getting it all twisted up and throwing it across the room in exasperation. It's a small thing, but it feels like a real personal victory! I did a simple chevron pattern which doesn't really show up, but does give it some extra texture. I love it - just waiting now for some cooler fall days.

Tales From TIFF. . .

2011-09-11T11:53:00.001-04:00

I haven't bought one yet, but I do love the TIFF messenger bag and actually all of their merchandise is quite nice and reasonably priced. It's the films though, that have taken a large chunk out of my credit card but so far, so good.

I started yesterday with a real winner - a gorgeously filmed tribute to black and white films and the silent era. It was The Artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius who I applaud for having the artistic guts to create a silent film in this 21st century of 3D movies and state of the art special effects, not that he doesn't imaginatively employ a few of the latter himself. Jean Dujardin stars as George Valentin, a charming, successful silent film actor whose career spirals downward when the talkies come to Hollywood. Berenice Bejo is Peppy Miller, a struggling actress given her first break by Valentin, but as her career soars, her attempts to help George revive his career, come up against his pride and ego. The plot resembles a lot of movies from the 1920s and 30s, but what makes The Artist such a cinematic treat is - ironically for a silent movie - the director's clever use of sound. There is almost zero dialogue in the entire movie or sound effects, but when they do make an appearance, they are used so effectively in enhancing both the humour and the style of the whole picture. There's a dream sequence that is just brilliant. There are definite homages to Singing in the Rain and the dance partnerships of Fred Astaire with both Ginger Rogers and Eleanor Powell; Dujardin is also definitely channelling the charm of Gene Kelly. I loved, loved this film. Great score too - a must for a silent film.

I then dashed off to see Andrea Arnold's adaptation of Wuthering Heights. I'm still in two minds about this one. There were aspects of the film that I liked very much. She certainly got the weather right; I was chatting to someone afterwards about the film and he said it could have been renamed "the four seasons of Wuthering Heights". And I thought it was interesting to have the entire film shot from Heathcliff's point of view. So no Lockwood, and Nelly plays a very minor role. However, I really wished she'd filmed the whole book. This is a novel about an intricate plot of revenge and also about the healing of the two houses at the end. As such, you really need to tell the story of the next generation - the second Cathy, Linton and Hareton. I don't know why film-makers always shy away from this. Arnold takes a few tentative steps - she does show Heathcliff wrestling ownership of Wuthering Heights from Hindley, but that's about it, choosing instead to focus on the childhood Cathy and Heathcliff, who is played as a runaway slave, by a black actor, which works very effectively although a lot of his language, especially his cursing, seemed too modern for the period (I could be completely wrong about this). The younger actors, especially the younger Cathy were terrific, which made the appearance of the older Cathy, played by a different actress, quite a let down. I actually thought it was Isabella when she first came on screen. It's a very visceral film; full of mud and wildlife (maybe too many dead bunnies for my liking) and raw emotions, and it's certainly different from other adaptations. But I still think the definitive film has yet to be made.

Three On the Go. . .

2011-09-05T13:01:00.000-04:00

It's been rather cold and rainy this holiday weekend, but I haven't really minded. It's been great for catching up with reading and knitting projects. My log cabin blanket is progressing really well. I've done eight blocks and I think twelve in total plus a border, will do nicely to drape over a sofa or be used as a bedspread.

And then I've been rather obsessive about the beekeeper's quilt and all those hexagon puffs. They are so addictive - I've done about twenty-five now which is very far away from a finished quilt. But even at this stage, I'm wondering whether to go for a completely random look like this:

Or to start organizing them better by colour and forming a more cohesive pattern like this:

To make matters worse, I tried knitting my first mitred block and it was so much fun, I'm now contemplating yet another blanket project. What I love about these blocks is not only the crazy stripes, but the raised stitches from the turns, which will form yet another wonderful textured pattern when the quilt is complete, just like "real quilting" would do.

I'm in real trouble here. With three blanket projects on the go, is there any hope that I'll get one of them completed by the first snow fall? And will I ever go back to real quilting? Anyone else in a similar dilemma?

Film Festival Frenzy. . .

2011-09-03T17:00:00.001-04:00

Every year, I tell myself I just won't do it. I won't go through the frustrating, multi-hour hassle of trying to get single tickets to the Toronto International Film Festival online. And yet every year, I succumb to the excitement of it all and the list of amazing films on offer, and get up bright and early, ready to hit that "reload" button a million times before I finally get through. Last year it took me nearly three hours.

This morning I had my fingers posed nimbly over the purchase button waiting for my computer clock to flash 7am. And lo and behold, it took me about five minutes to get in, and I was completely finished by 7:27am. Hallelujah! Then I went down to the Festival Office to pick up my tickets, only to learn that not only had the system subsequently crashed shortly after I got off it, but all the printers had gone down as well. I stayed in line for about 45 minutes chatting with other film fans in the hopes they'd have it fixed, but no such luck. I'm okay though - my tickets are confirmed and I just have to pick them up at another time. If I'd been one of those who had lined up since 5pm yesterday afternoon, I'd be a bit upset. But seriously, despite these computer glitches, TIFF really has improved their website. Most importantly, once you are in, you are in to the end. In previous years, you'd finally get through, choose your tickets and have the system time out just as you were typing in your credit card information. And you'd have to start all over from the beginning. When I got back home I decided to order a second batch of tickets. The website now puts you into a virtual waiting line and beeps when you are in. The message flashing was pretty scary "This could take up to 7 hours". But five minutes later, the message was saying "This could take up to 4.5 hours". In the end it took 33 minutes, and I had tickets to three more films.

I'm really excited about the 12 movies in total that I'll be seeing. Many are literary adaptions. I snagged tickets to Michael Winterbottom's Trishna, a retelling of Tess and the D'Urbervilles, starring Frieda Pinto; Terrence Davies' adaptation of Terence Rattigan's play The Deep Blue Sea, (pictured above) starring Rachel Weisz and one of my favourite UK actors, Simon Russell Beale; Bonsái, directed by Cristián Jiménez, based on the novella by Alejandro Zambra (part of Melville House's Art of the Contemporary Novella series), billed as "a romantic ode to love and literature"; and Andrea Arnold's adapation of Wuthering Heights. I loved her previous film Fish Tank - could she be the one to finally film this literary masterpiece properly? Below is a still from the film; I'm getting goosebumps already.

I'll also be seeing The Artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius, a film about a silent era star trying to make it in the talkies. This film got great buzz at Cannes. And Like Crazy, the winner of the Grand Jury Best Picture Award at the Sundance Film Festival, about a long-distance romance (which I'll be seeing with my own long-distance partner who will be in town that week - hooray - so it had better end well!). For me, TIFF just wouldn't be complete unless I saw a film with Kristin Scott Thomas in it and so I was really thrilled to get a ticket to her latest - The Woman in the Fifth. Ethan Hawke and Paris co-star.

I can't believe that any movie starring Hugh Laurie and Catherine Keener can be bad, particularly if it's a comedy, so I'm looking forward to The Oranges, directed by Julian Farino. Ditto for Emily Blunt who's latest movie is Your Sister's Sister, directed by Lynn Shelton. The political thriller Page Eight, directed and written by David Hare and starring Bill Nighy, Ralph Fiennes, Judy Davis and Rachel Weisz looks terrific. I have one animated film on my roster - an intriguing Czech movie called Alois Nebel, directed by Tomáš Lunák. Set during the Cold War, it's about a train dispatcher and apparently quite a homage to the movie Closely Watched Trains which I would easily put into my top ten list of movies set in train stations.

And my final film is by Canadian director Ingrid Veninger and it's called i am a good person/ i am a bad person. It's a drama about a mother and daughter's relationship falling apart as they travel to a film festival.

So I'll be seeing a little bit of everything. And this is the great thing about TIFF - real fans, who don't have corporate or film industry contacts, really can participate and see lots of great films. It just takes a bit of patience. And the best parts of the whole experience are the conversations you have in line with other film buffs. The fun starts a week from today. Can't wait.

My New Literary Crush: Michael Innes. . .

2011-09-01T22:14:00.010-04:00

Michael Innes, where have you been all my life?

Well actually you've been lurking in the dark corners of my bookcases - part of a neglected group that was hidden behind another layer on my doublestacked shelves. Fortunately, (or desperately), I've had to cull my overflowing shelves lately and so discovered a few of his novels. I can't remember when or where I bought them, but I must have read a glowing review somewhere. And I'm delighted to have found such a treasure among my many unread books.

I love mysteries with a sense of humour and if it's of the academic or bibliophilic type, even better. Which is why fiction written by authors who were also English professors (as John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, aka Michael Innes, was) are often so deliciously witty. The New Sonia Wayward had me at the first mention of our protagonist's wonderfully silly and yet appropiate name - Colonel Ffolliot Petticate. Folly and pettiness are certainly key themes that permeate this comedy of suspense.

In the opening paragraph, Sonia Wayward - Petticate's wife - has just died of natural causes while the couple was sailing in the English Channel. Something of their married life can be gleaned by what Petticate does next. After a careful consideration of how many of the suddenly extra pork chops now available for dinner he should eat, he takes his wife's clothes off, puts on her bathing suit and calmly tips her body overboard. When Petticate returns home to the small English village of Snigg's Green, he lies to his neighbours, telling them his wife is just on an extended trip and can't be contacted. Sonia was a successful writer of romances and the main breadwinner. She left an unfinished manuscript which Petticate, worried his income and way of life are about to disappear, tries to finish. He finds he quite enjoys the writing and believes in his talent. But his nerves are being stretched to the limit; he is under constant pressure from the police, Sonia's editor, and a famous sculptor to produce his wife, not to mention the unsettling presence of his two sinister servants who simply will not leave the house, even after being fired.

There are certainly shades of The Talented Mr. Ripley (published five years earlier), in The New Sonia Wayward. Petticate shares Tom Ripley's growing ego, his paranoia, and even at times his touching vulnerability. But Innes has a far more comic touch and the predicaments that Petticate finds himself in as a result of his lies and deceptions are very funny indeed, especially the last and most fitting one.

I'm hooked. I have two other Innes books to read - another standalone novel, From London Far, and Hamlet, Revenge!, one of his Inspector Appleby mysteries. If they prove to be as equally enjoyable, then this is going to be a very long affair. Innes was quite prolific and the House of Stratus editions are very handsome indeed.

Art of the Novella Challenge: The DUELS - Chekhov vrs von Kleist

2011-08-29T15:30:00.000-04:00

My next five novella reads will be the five "Duels" in which I'll pit one work against another and see which emerges victoriously as the last novella standing.

First up is Anton Chekhov's Duel, translated by Margarita Shalina and first published in 1891. At one end of the field, we have Ivan Laevsky, a bored civil servant living in the Caucasus with Nadya, a married woman who has deserted her husband to run away with him. His days consist of gambling, borrowing money, and spending time moaning to his good friend Doctor Samoylenko about how he has fallen out of love and is desperate to leave the town and start over - alone. Nadya, also suffering from a restless malaise and romantic disappointment, begins flirting with the son of a shop owner she owes money to, and more dangerously, embarks on an unsatisfying affair with Kirlin, the town's chief of police. Other characters populating this drama are Von Koren, a zoologist and tenant of the doctor, who has read his Darwin a little too closely and thinks loafers such as Laevsky should be destroyed; Maria Kostantinova, a well-meaning hostess who nevertheless criticizes Nadya for her lifestyle in a tirade of entertaining and blunt language; and one of my favourite characters, the Deacon, a happy go-lucky religious man who wouldn't be caught publicly attending a duel, but thankfully, just can't stay away. There's despair and desperation, lies and lethargy and plenty of discussion about morality and mortality.

I'm hoping that one of the joys of reading these five duelling novellas will be in the suspense of either not knowing which characters will end up as opponents, how it will come about, or for those situations in which the participants are obvious, being surprised by the outcome. Chekhov delivers deliciously on all counts, and I was very absorbed and engaged in this story.

Heinrich von Kleist's Duel, translated by Annie Janusch, was first published in 1810 but is set in the fourteenth century, and it took me back to undergrad days reading Chrétien de Troyes romances - at least in theme and plot if not in style. A Duke is murdered and suspicion falls on his half-brother, Count Jakob Rotbart. However he has a tight alibi; he spent the night with the beautiful and widowed Lady Littegarde who he had been courting unsuccessfully. He produces material proof and despite her protests of innocence, Littegarde's brothers denounce her and throw her out of their castle. She seeks the help of Sir Fredrich von Trota, one of her longest and ardent suitors, who promptly challenges Rotbart to a duel, or "trial by ordeal", wherein the outcome, decided by God, will be accepted as the indubitable truth. Only things don't go quite as planned. This is a short novella so I won't reveal anymore, but it was a good fairytale adventure coupled with some ambiguous moral and religious questioning. I enjoyed the fast paced plot and the melodrama of it all:

The battle now oscillated between the two fighters like two storm fronts swirling around each other - hurling and deflecting lightning bolts, towering above and rearing below the crack of heavy thunder.

So two very different types of duels, but for character development, atmosphere and the pure beauty of the prose, I have to go with the Chekhov. Plus von Kleist loses points for always making sure Littegard had a "half-bared breast" at her moments of crisis and (while not the fault of von Kleist), there is a major mistake on the jacket flap copy (which is rare for Melville).

The victor for this joust is Chekhov!

Thanks Jack. . .

2011-08-28T13:26:00.003-04:00

Here's the CN Tower all lit up in orange last night in tribute to Jack Layton. I listened to his state funeral on the radio and was very moved. From Stephen Lewis's powerful and touching eulogy calling Layton's letter to Canadians a "manifesto for social democracy" (which caused a huge round of extended applause and a standing ovation that even Stephen Harper had to participate in), to Steven Page singing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", to Lorraine Segato's rousing "Rise Up", it was a very beautiful and fitting tribute. As were all the amazing messages chalked on the sidewalks, up the sides of the ramps and on all conceivable surfaces in front of City Hall.

I spent part of this weekend just walking around this great city feeling very grateful to live here. Lots of people were wearing bits of orange in remembrance of Jack. I don't actually have any orange clothing but I did have a ball of orange wool, so having already started the beekeeper's quilt, I decided to just knit orange hexagons while listening to the funeral. It is a great, happy, hopeful and optimistic colour.

Knit One, Eye Another. . .

2011-08-25T10:16:00.002-04:00

My knitted log cabin progresses. I've almost done six squares; a few more and it'll be a blanket for one. Then I'll decide if I want to make it a blanket for two or even turn it into a possible bedspread. It's a great project to bring on the bus and my boring home bound commute as gone much faster as a result. And now I think I'm obsessed with knitted quilts because they don't require, well, any quilting. Don't get me wrong - I love quilting and have a towering stash of fat quarters and half-finished projects to prove it, but my apartment is small, filled with far too many books and as a result, spare table space to block and sew is quite limited. Knitting on the couch listening to music or the radio - no problems!

I've been completely inspired by some of the projects in Kay Gardiner and Ann Shayne's Mason Dixon Knitting, in particular their mitred block quilt. More info here. Gorgeous, isn't it.

Or how about this tumbling blocks blanket designed by Kaffe Fassett (free pattern download at Rowan's website here.)

And here's the adorable quilt that everyone seems to be knitting over at Ravelry (over 900 knitters around the world are currently working on this project - count me among them.) This puffy Beekeeper's Quilt designed by tiny owl knits is so great for using up spare yarn and there's no seaming. I think it'll be ideal to work on these while commuting and travelling. I'm going to give it a year and see how many I can do. Did my first "puff" last night and I was very happy with how it turned out. Thanks to Toronto's Knit Cafe blog for drawing my attention to it.

It's In the Bag. . .

2011-08-25T09:21:00.000-04:00

Moleskine now has bags??? Okay, I'm officially lusting after this one called "The Reporter". I love the elastic band that wraps around it, just like it does on their notebooks. You can see the full line at their website here.

Art of the Novella #4: Proust Pastiche. . .

2011-08-23T13:38:00.001-04:00

You don't have to be familiar with all the writers that Proust is imitating in this entertaining pastiche in order to enjoy reading this novella. Another way to view this story is as a exercise in the art of examining (or explicitly avoiding doing so) one basic story from many different, creative angles. The simple framework concerns a man named Lemoine who, claiming to be able to manufacture diamonds from coal, swindles a large amount of money, is caught and subsequently put on trial. Proust pays homage to (or skewers) writers including Balzac, Flaubert, Saint-Simon (who I now have no interest in reading) and the Goncourt brothers. My favourite chapter was the "critique" following Flaubert's account, in the voice of Sainte-Beuve. It was extremely funny. Many of Proust's own literary preoccupations are present, particularly the meticulous and exhausting detail paid to the endless rankings of aristocratic society and the artifice of that empty world. He also has a bit of gleeful, immature fun in his chapter devoted to Henri de Régnier, where, rather poetically, the discharge from a runny nose momentarily becomes an apt symbol of Lemoine's diamond scam.

So that makes four novellas read out of the nine I am aiming for this month. The final five will be the "Duel" books by Chekhov, Conrad, Casanova, von Kleist and Kuprin. We'll see which duellist is left standing.

The Postmodern Mystery. . .

2011-08-23T09:13:00.005-04:00

Now here's a fantastic reading list to work your way through. Ted Gioia has written an essay entitled "The Eight Memes of the Postmodern Mystery", citing such characteristics as "The Author Appears As a Character . . . Or Even a Suspect", "An Obsession With Texts", and "The Wounded Investigator". He warns that, "fans of conventional whodunits may do well to steer clear of these books, which will thwart their expectations, mess with their minds, and possibly undermine their faith in the triumph of law and order. Put simply, these books are not for the faint of heart."

Absolutely my type of reading!

You can read his essay here. And he's also included a list of Fifty Essential Works here. I've read only seven of the titles but all were completely original and memorable. And now I've quite a few more to add to the reading pile. Thanks to Literary Saloon for the link.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles Gets Updated. . .

2011-08-22T12:10:00.006-04:00

The trailer for Michael Winterbottom's new movie Trishna has just been released. You can view it here. Starring Freida Pinto, it's an interesting project, transporting Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles to India. I like the cast, the director, the trailer and the music promises to be amazing as well, with the original score created by one of my favourite film composers, Shigeru Umebayashi. I'm not sure how much of the Toronto film festival I'm going to be able to take in this year, but I'm certainly earmarking films that I definitely want to see.

Jack Layton - You Will Be Missed!

2011-08-22T09:49:00.003-04:00

I was so saddened to learn the news of Jack Layton's death this morning from cancer. I have been a huge fan of this politician from way back in my university days when he was a Toronto city councillor and I was a campus journalist. He always returned phone calls, gave great interviews, and was as passionate about making the city a better place as he was about improving the country in his later federal role. I was so thrilled when he became the official Leader of the Opposition earlier this year, and was looking forward to some intelligent and hard-hitting debate with Stephen Harper in Parliament this fall. He was a politician who put his money where his mouth was - a committed advocate for environmental issues, cycling, combatting poverty, improving social housing - Canada has truly lost a politician who could have made a real difference. Hopefully other MPs have been inspired by him and will continue his legacy. Layton seemed invincible and was such a fighter that I think everyone felt he'd beat the cancer hands down. My thoughts go out to his family and friends - such a sad day for the country.

Traipsing Around the U.K.: Hull

2011-08-20T09:44:00.008-04:00

And then it was off to Hull. Now this city gets a bit of a raw deal. It's true that it's pretty much on the road to nowhere, and it was voted Britain's crappiest town to live in a few years ago. But it also happens to be my birthplace and since I left at nine months and haven't been back since, it seemed time to make a pilgrimage.

I don't know what I was expecting to feel; nothing jarred any memory whatsoever. So I did what I usually do when visiting a new city - walked the streets, looked at architecture, grabbed a latte, popped into the art galleries and museums and browsed through a bookstore. I was only there for a few hours but it was definitely worth the trip. So for all those naysayers, here are some nice things about Hull.

1. You are greeted at the train station by a statue of Hull's most famous poet and librarian - Philip Larkin.

2. It has a really beautiful church - Holy Trinity - which is 700 years old and the largest (in area) parish church in England.

3. You can get some pretty good fish and chips in the city and the waterfront is in the process of being revitalized.

4. The Ferens Art Gallery is lovely. One of their exhibits was of David Hockney's massive painting Bigger Trees Near Warther, made up of fifty separate canvases.

5. There's a tiny street called The Land of Green Ginger said to be the inspiration for Winifred Holtby's novel of the same name.

My tie-in book purchase was a play called Toast by Richard Bean, who grew up in Hull. It's an amusing and slightly surreal story set one night in the canteen of a Hull bread factory as its assortment of workers take various breaks during their night shift. They have an extra large order to fulfill, the ovens are overheated, and tempers are rising just as much as the troubling batch mixed with too much yeast. I very much enjoyed reading it, as much for the humour as the dialect; it would be lovely to see this staged or listen to a recording, if only to imagine what I might have sounded like if I'd stayed and grown up there.

Not the Booker Prize Shortlist. . .

2011-08-18T12:00:00.007-04:00

So while we wait for the Man Booker shortlist to be announced (fingers crossed for Julian Barnes), the Guardian has released the shortlist of the Not The Booker Prize, voted on by readers. You can read about it here. It's all a bit tongue in cheek - one of the authors promised to post a picture of himself in the buff if he won - but I am pleased to see Lars Iyer's Spurious on the list (yes, my love for Melville House continues). But it really is a fun and quirky read. I started laughing from the moment I first saw the clever cover and continued to giggle throughout its chapters. It's about two friends (sort of), who are convinced they could have brilliant lives if they could only get off their butts and do something about it. Procrastinators rejoice. Along the way there are meditations on writing (or the lack of), philosophy, house mold, travel trials, and whether things would really be much better in Canada. In Dogma, the sequel coming out next spring, the two journey to the American South, in the company of Canadians no less, to start a new religion. Again, the cover is just terrific.

I was reminded of Spurious when I saw Michael Winterbottom's latest movie The Trip, starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. They also play two friends driving around the beautiful Yorkshire countryside, ostensibly to review pretentious food for a newspaper. They instead spend most of their time affectionately bickering about their lifestyles, their careers, ABBA lyrics, and who has the better Michael Caine impersonation. And the scenery is just gorgeous! If you like the sarcastic, self-deprecating, taking-the-piss humour of the Brits (and who doesn't?) then I can highly recommend all of the above.

Traipsing Around the U.K.: Manchester

2011-08-17T21:14:00.009-04:00

Manchester has a wonderful energy about it. The historical buildings are tall and red and majestic. Piccadilly Gardens, a public downtown square, is brimming with people enjoying the summer sunshine. There is a very good Waterstones (one of the ways I always judge a bookstore is by its staff picks) on Deansgate, and a beautiful university library - the John Rylands Library - which the public can pop into for a look. And in the Manchester Art Gallery, I was arrested by the painting pictured above - Umbrellas by Dorothy Brett, painted in 1917. There in the center is Ottoline Morrel with Lytton Strachey sitting on her left and Brett herself on Ottoline's right. And is that Carrington, bending her head on the left edge of the painting? I bought the postcard. It was quite a large work and very beautiful. The whole gallery is well worth a visit, particularly if you like decorative arts.

Then it was off on a short tram ride to Salford Quays and The Lowry, a complex that has a theatre and a gallery with a continuous exhibition of the paintings and drawings of L.S. Lowry, a painter I've encountered in books numerous times (my mum has a framed reproduction in her living room), but whose actual work I'd never seen before. It's a great collection and I particularly liked his simple but moving sea paintings, so different in style and subject from his better known depictions of urban and factory life in the English north.

Across from The Lowry is the Imperial War Museum North, a unique building designed by Daniel Libeskind to represent shards of the earth, shattered and then put back together. Inside, it's a very large, open space, with various side pods hosting themed exhibitions. I spent some time wandering through their War Correspondents display that featured among others, the work of Martha Gellhorn. I also went up the observation tower, and here's a warning to those who suffer from vertigo - the platform is made up of a steel walkway that is see-through. Even though the staff warned me not to look down, of course I did (it's actually hard not to) and got quite giddy. There's a good view of the city though.

Last stop was at the museum's gift shop where I bought Art From the First World War. It features many of the works and artists I was already familiar with - Paul Nash, William Orphen, Wyndham Lewis, CRW Nevinson - but introduced me to some paintings I had not seen before, such as Henry Lamb's "Irish Troops in the Judean Hills Surprised by a Turkish Bombardment, 1919", which is painted from the perspective of looking down at the ground from quite high up, and Walter Bayes' "The Underworld: Taking Cover in a Tube Station During a London Air Raid, 1918". There are also entries by women war artists Anna Airy and Flora Lion, who painted women doing war work in factories and canteens. A nice addition to my growing collection of books on the First World War.

Traipsing Around the U.K.: Liverpool

2011-08-16T08:48:00.010-04:00

Like most people, I was saddened to hear about the recent riots in several British cities. I spent a couple of weeks this summer with a BritRail pass, making day trips to several of the cities involved and had a marvellous time strolling the streets and appreciating the architecture, reading in cafes, exploring the art galleries, and yes doing a bit of book shopping. So to combat a bit of the negative image that has pervaded the media, I want to celebrate the vibrancy and endless variety of everything England has to offer to tourists. Or alternatively, here's what I did on my summer vacation and these are the books that I bought.

First stop: Liverpool. I really like this city. This is a view from the top of the Anglican cathedral (well worth the climb).

The architecture is just fantastic and they've done some wonderful things with the downtown core making it very pedestrian friendly. They've also been revitalizing their waterfront (a new museum just opened while I was there), and as such, it's an extremely enjoyable city to walk. They also have some really lovely art galleries, which in the U.K. are mostly free. London gets all the attention and true, they do host some of the best galleries and museums in the world, but there are all sorts of delightful and fascinating collections scattered around the U.K. In many ways, I prefer visiting these smaller places with no particular expectations and then being knocked off my feet discovering a new, perhaps local artist, or encountering an interesting painting by someone famous that I'd never seen reproduced in a book, calendar or tea towel.

My first visit was to the Tate Liverpool, down on the Albert Docks (great views of the Mersey from its windows) where I was really pleased to see that they were hosting an Rene Magritte exhibit (you do have to pay for this, but trust me, it's well, well worth the money). I LOVED this exhibit - it's running until October 16th so if you are anywhere near the city, do check it out. Not only were many of his famous paintings on display, wonderfully curated by theme, but the rooms also showcased some of his photography, and of most interest to me, lots of his commercial design work - movie posters, advertising, fashion plates. Again, things I'd never seen before. Apparently he hated doing this to pay the bills, but it was amazing work. I don't normally buy exhibition catalogues, but had to make an exception with this one - Magritte A to Z by Christoph Grunenberg. The Tate store was also selling it at a discount - how could I resist? What I really wanted to buy though was a bowler hat.

Off next to the beautiful Walker Art Gallery where again, another interesting exhibit was on display. Art in Revolution: Liverpool in 1911, juxtaposed post-impressionist paintings that were originally shown in 1911 (following the famous 1910 exhibit curated by Roger Fry that caused so much controversy in London) with footage and commentary about the labour strikes and demonstrations that occurred in the city (just outside the gallery) leading to several deaths. A lovely blend of art and history, questioning the multiple meanings of "revolution".

Finally, I was in the city on the opening day of the new Liverpool Museum. It was packed and not all of the rooms were yet open but what I saw, I really liked. I mostly focused on the exhibits dealing with the city's artists - poets, playwrights, actors and yes, of course The Beatles. You also get some great views of the waterfront from its windows. And there's a Canadian connection. This photo was shot from the museum (sorry - not the greatest shot; it was raining) of Canada Boulevard. That line of maple trees represents every Canadian ship that was lost during the Second World War.

Cabin Fever. . .

2011-08-13T11:49:00.007-04:00

Whenever I start a new knitting project, I make a point of always attempting a new technique. Having some scrap yarn lying around from previous projects, I decided to try turning and picking up stitches, and so knitted this log cabin square. It was so much fun! I immediately envisioned snuggling under a huge wool blanket in front of a roaring fire (a completely crazy thought since it's the height of a hot and muggy summer and anyways, I don't have a fireplace). Nevertheless, impulse is my middle name, so it was off to the wool store with my credit card.

Now, I'm not a masocist. The square above was knitted with 4.5mm needles and measures about 9.5 inches square. It would take forever to knit a blanket. So I decided to double up the wool, which gives it the extra warmth I know I'll want in the dead of winter, and knitted a few swatches with different size needles, finally settling on using the 7.5mm. I stayed up far too late finishing my first square which measures about 15 inches square.

But I'm pretty pleased with the results. I decided to use seed stitch for the middle to make the red pop out and give it a bit of extra texture. If I complete a couple of squares a week, I might even be able to finish this before the first snowfall.

On Track With Another Neversink. . .

2011-08-11T16:08:00.001-04:00

I'm taking a wee break from the novellas to return to another of my Melville passions - their fantastic Neversink Library which aims to bring back lost classics, many of them in translation. I so completely trust their editorial acumen that I'm determined to read them all. The series kicked off earlier this year with Irmgard Keun's wonderful After Midnight, reviewed here, and now I've read Georges Simenon's equally atmospheric The Train, translated by Robert Baldick.

I could not put this little gem down; Simenon is just so good at narrative voice. The Germans have invaded Belgium and are advancing on Northern France. Marcel Feron, a married man with a small daughter and another child on the way, lives very simply with his wife in a small French town, fixing radios and raising chickens. He says he is perfectly happy. But as the Nazis advance, the people in the town start packing up to try and catch one of the last trains leaving the area. Marcel suddenly decides to join them, not so much out of concern for his family's safety, but through a nagging premonition that this is his opportunity to encounter Fate:

I wasn't responsible anymore. Perhaps that's the word, perhaps that's what I was trying to explain just now. Only the day before, it had been up to me to manage my life and that of my family, to earn a living, to arrange for things to happen in the way things have to happen.
But not now. I had lost my roots. I was no longer Marcel Feron, radio engineer in a newish district of Fumay, not far from the Meuse, but one man among millions whom superior forces were going to toss about at will. . . From now on, decisions were no longer any concern of mine. Instead of my own palpitations, I was beginning to feel a sort of general palpitation. I wasn't living at my tempo anymore, but at the tempo of the radio, of the street, of the town which was waking up much faster than usual.

At the station, the men are separated into different carriages from the women and children, and Marcel completely loses track of his family when his freight car is uncoupled during the night. Strangely calm and nonplussed, he continues his long rail journey, forming a relationship with Anna, a mysterious young woman, reticent about her past, who climbs into the train without any luggage. The story follows their affair as they travel towards a refugee camp in the south of France, and these portions reminded me very much of the similar chaos described in Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française. Marcel is narrating this episode from a period many years in the future. His voice has a calm wistfulness about it but his detachment is his undoing. This is very much a tale of lost opportunity, both for happiness and a self-redeeming and self-esteeming decency. Here, Fate is not going to trump personality and cowardice. The ending was just superb. I will be thinking about this book for quite a while.

Tanked!. . .

2011-08-08T10:03:00.003-04:00

It's still one of my goals to improve my knitting skills this year and after my disasterous attempts at hats (I am still determined to knit one for this winter though!), I switched to something more summery. It's taken a few months of on-and-off but I finally finished this tank top over the weekend and it actually FITS! The wool is a really lovely colour - sort of peacocky blue. It's CascadeYarns 220 Superwash. The pattern is taken from The Yarn Girls' Guide to Beyond the Basics by Julie Carles and Jordanna Jacobs. This is the first bit of clothing I've ever knitted so I'm feeling quite chuffed and it gives me the confidence to perhaps move on to a sweater. Sleeves are scary though!

Celebrating Stella Gibbons. . .

2011-08-08T08:52:00.003-04:00

There's a nice article here in the Guardian about the re-issues of Stella Gibbons' novels just out in the U.K. and available in Canada next month. These include two "sequels" to the delightful Cold Comfort Farm. Apparently, Virginia Woolf was enraged that the novel won the Prix Étranger when it was published in 1932. I'm particularly looking forward to reading Westwood, a novel set in London during the Second World War and featuring a bookish woman. The best news from this article is that there are 14 more re-issues to come over the next few seasons!

Art of the Novella Challenge #3: May Day

2011-08-07T07:41:00.000-04:00

First published in 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald's novella May Day has many of the characteristics of his novels: fancy parties, the disillusioned and delusional, and lots of wealthy people getting drunk, behaving badly while quite oblivious to the desperation of those less fortunate all around them. In this case the story is compressed into roughly 24 hours in New York City which is booming with economic prosperity, but also teeming with tired and damaged soldiers coming back from the First World War. One such veteran is Gordon Sterrett, a former Yale graduate, now nervous, unemployed and broke. He visits a former classmate to try and borrow $300 in order to extricate himself from a messy relationship and to get set up as a commercial artist. His friend is not sympathetic. That evening - and several drinks later - he shows up at an alumni dance where he re-encounters Edith, the woman he had fallen in love with at school, who has shown up with another - also unsatisfactory - date. Crashing the party are two working class soldiers looking for booze, while outside on the streets, mobs are beating up on socialists and heading towards the leftist newspaper that Edith's brother writes for. By the early hours of the morning, several tragedies will have taken place.

This was a wonderful story. I loved the pacing, the settings - from glitzy ballroom to an all-night diner - the dialogue and the segues back and forth between the different scenes. Most poignant was the weariness and wariness that Fitzgerald imbues to many of his characters and their sense of loss in this post-war society set against the abundance of luxury consumer goods that beckon from the shop windows of the city.

For the WWI Collection. . .

2011-08-05T10:49:00.008-04:00

Dovegreyreader has a lovely post about the recent team read she did with Matthew Hollis' new book, Now All Roads Lead to France, about the last few years of the poet Edward Thomas, focusing on his friendship with Robert Frost. You can read her post here.

The book sounds wonderful and I'll definitely be buying a copy. Reading about it sent me scurrying to my shelves in search of Elected Friends: Robert Frost & Edward Thomas To One Another, edited by Matthew Spencer. It's a collection of their letters which should be the perfect companion read. I've just opened it up near the end to read Frost's letter to Helen Thomas after hearing about her husband's death. It includes this bit:

I knew from the moment when I first met him at his unhappiest that he would someday clear his mind and save his life. I have had four wonderful years with him. I know he has done this all for you: he's all yours. But you must let me cry my cry for him as if he were almost all mine too.

To follow up, it's also worth digging out a copy of the Fall 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review - it contains the lost war poem by Frost entitled "War Thoughts At Home" and some essays on how the war and his relationship with Thomas influenced his writing. I knew there was a reason I hoard my books. A time and place for every one.

Art of the Novella Challenge #2: A Read and A Forgetting. . .

2011-08-05T06:49:00.002-04:00

William Dean Howells' A Sleep and A Forgetting, first published in 1907, was probably not the best choice for a commuter read. I'm often a bit sleepy on the bus to work and frequently tired and eye-strained on the way back; the constant references to naps taken by the heroine and the rather languid prose didn't help. This is the story of thirty-year old Dr. Lanfear, the nephew of a famous psychologist, who is also fascinated by the workings of the mind. He's on holiday in Italy and stopping in San Remo to do a favour for a friend, he encounters an elderly man whose beautiful daughter has been traumatized by witnessing her mother's death and subsequently has lost both her long and short term memory. She'll meet someone and completley forget the encounter the next day. Beguiled and intrigued by her beauty and personality, Lanfear agrees to help Nannie, and through a series of walks and conversations in the surrounding countryside, she slowly grasps fragments of her past - vague perceptions more than solid facts - until a trip to the ruins of a town devasted by an earthquake and a subsequent shock bring the story to its conclusion. There are some big ideas being explored here about time, memory and ontology, such as in this passage where Lanfear ponders on his patient's state of consciousness:

He had always said to himself that there could be no persistence of personality, of character, of identity, of consciousness, except through memory; yet here, to the last implication of temperment, they all persisted. The soul that was passing in its integrity through time without the helps, the crutches, of remembrance by which his own personality supported itself, why should not it pass so through eternity without that loss of identity which was equivalent to annihilation?

That passage also gives you a sense of the style which just wasn't suited to my reading mood on a crowded bus. I also found the ending rather weak and predictable. I think a second and closer reading would do this work more justice, but I think I'll keep moving on with the challenge.

One Novella Down. . .

2011-08-01T09:32:00.004-04:00

Well, that was a lovely way to start the day. Cup of tea (actually several) and a sweeping story about a beautiful, headstrong woman named Freya, "a ship-child, a sea-girl", the two sailing captains who lust after her - one man's love is requited, but he's equally in love with his boat, the other is quite simply a delusional villain - and Freya's father who is completely oblivious to all the drama going on around him. Of course it was never going to end well, but Conrad rather deliciously and sympathetically, plays with the shifting level of each character's complicity in this tragic, tropical triangle. Not forgetting our curiously nosy and astute narrator who understands what is happening (is probably just a bit in love with Freya too), and who has a hand in the secrets but doesn't say anything until it's too late. It's an old-fashioned yarn of envy, pride, anger, and the melodramatic revenge plot that only can comes from being scorned and humilated over love. It was too early in the morning, but I really should have read this in a pub with a half-pint of shandy.

The Art of the Novella Reading Challenge. . .

2011-08-01T04:58:00.012-04:00

Just back from a few weeks travelling and hiking around the U.K., visiting lots of art museums, treading literary paths, and of course buying books (more on that to come!). I'm so glad that today is a civic holiday, allowing me to unpack, unwind, and have a relaxing day at home. Not yet adjusted to the time difference, I've been up bright and early and catching up on some favourite blogs. I was reminded that today begins the Art of Novella Reading Challenge, started by Frances at Nonsuch Books - she's going to try and read all 42 in Melville House's colourful series in the month of August AND blog about each one. Melville has joined in the spirit and created these various different levels of participation:

Curious – Read 1 novella
Fascinated — Read 3 novellas
Captivated – Read 6 novellas
Passionate — Read 9 novellas
Mesmerized – Read 15 novellas
Obsessed – Read 21 novellas
Fanatical – Read 27 novellas
Unstoppable — Read 33 novellas
Bibliomaniac — Read all 42 novellas

I'm rooting for her! And a novella is perhaps just the perfect thing to tackle on this holiday Monday. I'd love to try and attempt the Bibliomaniac level myself, but I know there's a ton of work waiting on my desk tomorrow. Still, they are the perfect commuting reads so I'm also going to see how many I can read this month. Having just spent the last week in Cornwall, I'm up for a sea adventure, so I'm starting with Joseph Conrad's Freya of the Seven Isles, first published in 1912.

They'll Always Have Paris. . .

2011-07-12T02:44:00.009-04:00

I recently spent a few days in the lovely city of Paris, having just read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (yes, I'm aware it's such a clichéd thing to do, but I'd actually never read this memoir of living in Paris in the 1920s, even though I'd been on quite a Hemingway kick as a teenager). And having also read Paula McLain's novel The Paris Wife, told from the point of view of Hadley, Hemingway's first wife, I was curious to see how the original compared. Even though it was written several decades after the events it describes, I found it oddly moving (particulary Hemingway's regret over the end of his relationship with Hadley), very funny at times, and inspiring in his dedication to the work that good writing takes. Here's one passage I liked on him discovering the great Russian authors in Sylvia Beach's lending library at Shakespeare & Company:

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.

And no trip to Paris would be complete of course without a visit to the legendary bookstore that Beach inspired.
My hotel was in Montparnasse, just around the corner from La Closerie des Lilas, where Hemingway liked to spend time uninterrupted, and where he wrote parts of The Sun Also Rises. It's now quite a swanky restaurant.

My favourite passage from A Moveable Feast was this one on writing in cafes and getting totally immersed in the process. He certainly worked at his craft:

Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and work up onto the high ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake. A pencil lead might break off in the conical nose of the pencil sharpener and you would use the small blade of the penknife to clear it or else sharpen the pencil carefully with the sharp blade and then slip your arm through the sweat-salted leather of your pack strap to lift the pack again, get the other arm through and feel the weight settle on your back and feel the pine needles under your moccasins as you started down for the lake.

Also accompanying me on the trip was Enrique Vila-Matas's Never Any End to Paris, translated by Anne McLean. It seemed the perfect literary companion with its title taken straight from Hemingway. However as Vila-Matas notes, while A Moveable Feast chronicles Hemingway's years in Paris when he was "very poor but very happy", Never Any End to Paris is about his own sojourn in the mid-1970s, when he was "very poor and very unhappy." It too is a meditation on starting out as a writer, given as a series of lectures, looking back on those early days when, following his literary idol, he rented a small garret (from Marguerite Duras no less), and set out to write his first novel. But as with tourists today, there's no getting away from the self-consciousness of it all:

I bought myself two pairs of glasses, two identical pairs, which I didn't need at all, I bought them to look more intellectual. And I began smoking a pipe, which I judged (perhaps influenced by photos of Jean-Paul Sartre in the Café de Flore) to look more interesting than taking drags on mere cigarettes. But I only smoked the pipe in public, as I couldn't afford to spend much money on aromatic tobacco. Sometimes, sitting on the terrace of some café, as I pretended to read some maudit French poet, I played the intellectual, leaving my pipe on the ashtray(sometimes the pipe wasn't even lit) and taking out what were apparently my reading glasses and taking off the other pair, identical to the first and with which I couldn't read a thing either. But this didn't cause me too much grief, since I wasn't trying to read the wretched French poets in public, but rather to feign being a profound Parisian cafe terrace intellectual. I was, ladies and gentlemen, a walking nightmare.

This passage gives a good example of the tone throughout; witty, self-deprecating, just a tad obnoxious at times, but always entertaining. He encounters a number of writers along the way, has a memorable encounter with an intense Isabelle Adjani at a party, and does a fair bit of posturing and pondering about his life, his first novel, cinema, and why nobody - especially his wife -seems to see his physical resemblance to Hemingway. Carrying at all times in his back pocket a crumpled list of writing tips given to him by Duras, this memoir is as much a reflection on the difficulties a writer has in finding inspiration and subject matter, as it is about recounting youthful life-shaping experiences. It's also inevitably about Paris, and that was feast enough for me.

Summertime and the Cotton Knitting is Easy. . .

2011-06-18T09:48:00.008-04:00

I recently was working at the book fair of a long (eight day!) academic conference that took place in the lovely city of Fredericton, New Brunswick. I found a really wonderful shop downtown called Yarns on York and absolutely fell in love with the colour of this deep coral yarn. It's called Sawya and is 60% cotton, 25% alpaca and 15% silk. It's created by Mirasol, and I love that proceeds go to building schools in remote areas of Peru. It's a dream to knit, and I had a lot of fun creating this summer scarf.

Then I finally finished a project that I've been working on since January. Part of the problem was that I was using this lovely textured, 100% cotton yarn made by Mission Falls, which then was subsequently discontinued. Of course I didn't initially buy enough and so had to scour a number of yarn stores in and around Toronto before I thankfully found a few more balls.

My inspiration for this was taking a block from Nicky Epstein's fabulous book Knitting Block by Block called Seed Stitch Cookie Twist (page 194) and expanding it into a scarf.

It turned out to be quite heavy so I think I'll be using it more as a fall scarf. But it's wide enough to work as a nice summer wrap for cooler nights.

Read the Small Print. . .

2011-06-16T20:03:00.003-04:00

I'm trying to decide if this would be the coolest poster ever, or if it just makes my eyes hurt. Spineless Classics creates posters that include the entire text of the book - in about 4pt, which apparently can be read if you have 20/20 vision, or with a magnifying glass. You can see the different selections on their website here. (Thanks to The Fabric of My Life for the link).

A Little Russian Surrealism from the 1920s. . .

2011-06-14T10:54:00.007-04:00

Quadraturan from Valeriy Kozhin on Vimeo.

I love this animated film of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s short story "Quadraturan" found in his collection of surreal and very funny tales written in the 1920s called Me mories of the Future, translated by Joanne Turnball. I highly recommend the whole collection - there's a great story called "The Bookmark" in which the Eiffel Tower decides to run away. The other thing I like about the collection is how many of the pieces deal in some way with relationships between words, books and readers. Completely original and entertaining. Thanks to NYRB's A Different Stripe for the link to the video.

Looking forward to Krzhizhanovsky's next book, also published by NYRB Classics, coming out in December. The Letter Killers Club promises a group of writers who are "professional killers of conceptions" and compares it to G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, a book I also quite liked.

Woody Goes to Paris. . .

2011-06-06T09:11:00.006-04:00

It's been a while since I've so enjoyed a Woody Allen movie but his latest, Midnight in Paris, is the perfect summer escape. Not only for all the great shots of the city - the opening is a lovely montage of different Paris locations in the day, in the rain and at night - but the script is clever, moving and very funny. Owen Wilson plays Gil Pender, a Hollywood hack who wants to be a serious novelist. He is visiting Paris with his fiancee Inez (played by Rachel McAdams) and her parents, none of whom find the city as enchanting as he does. While Inez spends her time in the company of a pendantic bore, played by Michael Sheen, Gil gets transported back to 1920s Paris and starts hanging out with Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein and a young woman who has been modelling for Picasso. There's a very entertaining scene in a bar where Gil is trying to explain that he's a time traveller to Dali, Man Ray and Buñuel, none of whom find it at all unusual. Oh, and the gorgeous clothes! And music by Cole Porter. And the Charleston. Just cinematic bliss.

A couple of other related things to recommend:

I'm fairly new to downloading podcasts, but I've thankfully discovered Filmspotting and it has quickly become my essential Friday treat. Matty and Adam are terrific at talking about what makes a movie worth seeing, they love many of my favourite films, they have a funny segment called Massacre Theatre where they enact a famous scene for viewers to guess at, and every episode ends with a fun and thoughtful "Top 5" list on various cinematic subjects. Plus they don't just review new films, but often embark on marathons to further their own ongoing education. Their latest episode was just wonderful - a review of Midnight at Paris (they loved it), a discussion about Red, the last film in their Krzysztof Kieslowski marathon, and their Top 5 movies set in Paris. Honestly, if you love film, you must listen to these guys! You can download their free podcast from iTunes or listen to it at their website here.

And if you love Paris (and who doesn't?) and Woody Allen films, particularly Husbands and Wives, you would enjoy Hervé Le Tellier's novel Enough About Love. Two women in their forties embark on affairs - one will be successful, one won't - and the novel follows both women, their husbands and their new lovers, as they talk, philosophize and intellecualize about relationships and love. There is a psychatrist - as in many Allen films - but he's one of the participants involved, so he's not much help. I loved the playfulness of the prose and seriousness of the discussions. Very French, and yes, it will make you want to go to Paris tout suite!

Two Very Different World War II Novels. . .

2011-05-25T11:24:00.010-04:00

I've just read a great pairing of two very interesting novels, completely different in style, but both written by Germans, both containing short narratives compressed into just a few days, and each ostensibly - but not exclusively - about the Second World War, with one set just before, and one taking place during its end. I've previously read and enjoyed two novels by Irmgard Keun: The Artificial Silk Girl (reviewed here) and Child of All Nations. So I was thrilled to see that the inaugural book in Melville House's exciting new imprint, The Neversink Library, was Keun's 1937 novel After Midnight, translated by Anthea Bell.
After Midnight is far more political than the other two novels. It's the late 1930s and Sanna is a young woman living in Frankfurt with her older stepbrother Algin, a writer who has had some previous fame with one of his novels having been turned into a movie, but whose work has drawn the ire of the Nazis. Sanna who admits she is uneducated and ignorant of the world, is trying to enjoy an ordinary life, gossiping about men with her friends, hanging out in bars drinking, and helping Algin's wife Liska plan a party. But inevitably politics dangerously intrudes, most obviously in the appearance of Hitler himself, as the city makes preparations for his visit. Her best friend Gerti is in love with a man who is half-Jewish. Liska is in love with Heini, a writer who openly and cynically criticizes the new regime. They have Jewish friends who are trying to escape the country. Like Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone, this is a world full of the paranoia of not being able to trust your neighbour, grudges turning into denunciations, and the fear, and isolating loneliness of trying to live up to principles in a crazy world. It's a place where wives go out to buy lots of alcohol for their husbands, hoping to entice them to drink at home instead of in a bar where one loose, intoxicated word could lead to an arrest. But Keun has a lighter touch than Fallada; her female narrators are always young, naive and vulnerable but with a cynical toughness at their core and an ability to apply the hypocrises of daily life to the larger historical events. Sanna is learning as much about the pain and complexities of love as she is about politics and she states her discoveries - such as her thoughts about Gerti's predicament - very directly, if somewhat innocently:

It's hard enough to know your way around all the rules the authorities lay down for business - business as we all know, can be very trickily organized - and now we have to know the rules of love too. It isn't easy, it really isn't. Before you know it, you may find yourself castrated or in prison, which is not pleasant. Love is supposed to be all right, and German women are supposed to have children, but before you can do that some sort of process involving feelings is called for. And the law says no mistakes must be made in the process. I suppose the safest thing is not to love anyone at all. For as long as that's allowed.

The novel depicts a couple of days in Sanna's life as she interacts with various self-absorbed characters who later appear as guests at the party, while trying to wrestle with her own feelings of love and pity for a cousin who has turned up unexpectedly. There is so much wonderful imagery, dialogue and disillusionment packed into this novel's brief slice of Weimar life, along with a poignant commentary on the plight of German writers during this time, struggling with their conscience to make a living in an atmosphere of censorship. As Heini remarks: "A writer who is afraid is no true writer." I really loved this novel; it was both gutsy and poetic. I'm sure there's a PhD thesis out there on the role of parties as precursor to death or disaster in 20th century literature - think Mrs. Dalloway or Joyce's "The Dead" - and while I wouldn't quite put Keun in that tight circle of masterpieces, I do think she's owed a spot on the guest list.

Heinrich Böll’s 1949 novel The Train Was on Time, translated by Leila Vennewitz, is also published by Melville House as part of their Essential Heinrich Böll series. This was his first novel, and the first writing of his that I've read. It follows a few days in the life of Andreas, a twenty-four year old German soldier, as he travels by train towards the Eastern Front, during the last year of the war. He becomes convinced that he will die shortly - this coming Sunday - and it will be somewhere en route between Lvov and Cernauti. He becomes obsessed with the word "soon"; a rhythmic mantra that both soothes and drives him crazy as the train carries on:

Soon. Soon. Soon. Soon. When is Soon? What a terrible word: Soon. Soon can mean in one second, Soon can mean in one year. Soon is a terrible word. This Soon compresses the future, shrinks it, offers no certainty, no certainty whatever, it stands for absolute uncertainty. Soon is nothing and Soon is a lot. Soon is everything. Soon is death. . .

The reader could replace "soon" with "war" or even "this novel" and you would have the thematic gist of this story. Certain of his predicament, Andreas engages in both the ordinary - eating, drinking, playing cards with two fellow soldiers in the corridor of the train - and the philosophical. He thinks back to a pair of enigmatic female eyes he briefly saw as he was wounded. He thinks about his chaplain friend Paul and tries to pray, not only for all the people he has hurt or insulted in the past, but also the millions of Jews who have been murdered by the Nazis. His last night is spent in the company of a Polish prostitute and spy, in one last attempt to grasp some meaning out of life, to find some human connection of commonality and empathy, and perhaps to even contemplate escaping his fate. This was a novel with far more claustrophobic interiority and existential, almost nightmarish angst than Keun's, but no less urgent in its tale of inevitable despair and the yearning for life's beauty and humanity.

Guess Who's Coming To My TV Screen?. . .

2011-05-15T20:59:00.007-04:00

I just bought this fabulous DVD set of all nine movies that Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn made together - some of which, like Woman of the Year, Adam's Rib and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? I've previously seen, though not recently - and others which are new to me. I'm dedicating this week to watching them all in chronological order. I started tonight with the documentary that was included as an extra - The Spencer Tracy Legacy, made in 1986 and narrated by Hepburn. She doesn't talk about their personal life, but at the end she reads a letter that she felt compelled to write one night to Spencer, eighteen years after his death. It's loving and affectionate but full of questions - still - about the personal demons that haunted him. There are tears in her eyes as she reads, and I needed the kleenex as well. I'm looking forward to a marathon of this magical movie duo.

Knopf U.S. is publishing a huge biography of Spencer Tracy this fall, by James Curtis. It's over a thousand pages and to be honest, I don't know that I need such a detailed portrayal, but I am absolutely mesmerized by the cover. This is definitely not the first image that comes to mind when I think of Tracy, but the photo completely draws me in with its claustrophobic intensity.

New WWI novels. . .

2011-05-05T16:09:00.010-04:00

George at Great War Fiction has this review of a new novel called Bleakly Hall by Elaine Di Rollo which sounds right up my alley. It's the story of two women who met during the war while working as a nurse and ambulance driver respectively, and have now come to work at Bleakly Hall, a military hospital for the shellshocked that uses hydropathic treatments. It's interesting to note that the author is an academic teaching in the actual building that used to be Craiglockhart Hospital (familiar to fans of Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy). As George states in his review, he's usually sceptical about contemporary fiction set during the Great War, but in this novel, "the period detail is accurate, the investigation into what war does to people is acute, and the psychology, even of the most outrageous characters, is believable." I look forward to reading it.

I also have a copy on the to-be-read pile of Louisa Young's My Dear I Wanted To Tell You - also a fictional look at WWI, but more of a romantic saga. And Jacqueline Winspear's latest Maisie Dobbs mystery, A Lesson in Secrets, is beckoning. In this one, Maisie heads off to Cambridge working undercover for the British Secret Service.

Return to Cold Comfort Farm. . .

2011-04-17T18:26:00.011-04:00

I'm really quite excited that Vintage U.K. is bringing back into print some of Stella Gibbons' other novels this fall. Cold Comfort Farm is one of those books I never get tired of re-reading. I actually perused Conference at Cold Comfort Farm many years ago but remember not thinking much of it at the time. I had discovered it among the stacks of an academic library while waiting for a friend who was doing some research. I think I only had an hour to speed read my way through it, so I may have not have done it justice. According to the book's description, the farm is hosting a conference of the "International Thinkers Group" that includes Mr. Mybug, so that promises to be fun; I'm willing to give it another go. I know I've never read Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, a collection of short stories that includes scenes of a typical Starkadder Christmas complete with "unsuitable presents and unpleasant insertions into the pudding." While I'm sure neither of these will match up to the original, I'm definitely game to revisit the farm and its eccentric characters.

Vintage is also republishing two other novels by Gibbons that I'm also looking forward to reading. Starlight is about two poor sisters who get a new landlord with a wife who seems to be possessed by spirits, and Westwood looks particularly like my cup of tea - the story of a bookish girl and her more beautiful friend, vying for the attentions of an egotistic playwright who doesn't seem to deserve either of them. I'm hoping it contains some good doses of literary satire. Cold Comfort Farm was Gibbons' first novel. Were the others so slight or badly written that they merited languishing in obscurity all this time? I can't quite believe it.

Jazz and Jealousy. . .

2011-04-16T19:41:00.004-04:00

I do love a movie with a good jazz score. I think of Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows with that great score by Miles Davis, Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder with music composed and played by Duke Ellington and his orchestra, and Elmer Berstein's score for Preminger's The Man With the Golden Arm.

So I was looking forward this afternoon to watching Basil Dearden's 1962 movie All Night Long. My DVD is part of Criterion's Eclipse Series #25: Basil Deardon's London Underground, a set of four movies by this British director. It's a retelling of Othello set among jazz musicians as a party is held for the first year anniversary of married couple Delia and Rex. He's the leader of a successful jazz band; she's a former singer who gave up her career for marriage. Johnny Cousin is the Iago in this film; a jealous drummer who wants a band of his own with Delia as its star, and who tries to break the couple up by feeding Rex's jealousy. You know the story; the ending won't quite be the same. It was all a bit melodramatic (thunderclaps at portentous moments) and the acting isn't terribly good. The party seems quite devoid of guests except for the main characters (no budget for extras, I suppose) and there's an awful lot of going in and out of rooms whenever Deardon needs some quiet for two characters to talk. Still, the music is terrific and the musicians include Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus and Tubby Hayes with enough camera time on them to let them rip. Their scenes are definitely the best bits of the movie.

I haven't given up on this set or Deardon though. I quite enjoyed Victim, a 1961 film about homophobia in England starring Dirk Bogarde, and next up will be 1960's The League of Gentlemen, a heist movie starring Richard Attenborough and Roger Livesey which looks like fun. 1959's Sapphire, about a murder that stirs up racial unrest, rounds out the set.

A Spaetzle Saturday. . .

2011-04-10T12:58:00.017-04:00

Some days it's all about the quest for that perfect meal.

Yesterday morning, I was reading one of my favourite food blogs - Smitten Kitchen - and there was this post about how to make spaetzle, a type of German noodles that I'd never heard of or tasted before. As someone who has long wanted to try making homemade pasta but who lacks the required counter space, equipment and patience, this seemed a perfect and easy alternative. However, as the blogger rightly pointed out, it helps to have a Spaetzle Maker.

I was shortly due to meet a friend for a long walk, en route to a farmer's market (where a basket of organic onions would come in handy later). Enthusing about my sudden obsessive need to make spaetzle that night (which she completely understood; she's known me too long), I enlisted her help in checking out several local kitchen gadget stores in search for this elusive tool. Either the spring weather has created spaetzle fever, or Smitten Kitchen has a lot of Toronto readers, but I heard from more than one retailer that they'd either just sold out, or didn't carry them, but had recently had inquires. I'd nearly given up, but thankfully I remembered The Pepper Mill and yes, they had them (see above) and yes, they still have more in stock.

Okay, so why did this recipe torment me all day, apart from the fact that it's really fun to say?

1. Easy ingredients. Flour, eggs (a lot of them - I used Omega 3 ones) and milk. Combine.

2. They are so much fun to make! Once the batter has cooled in the fridge for an hour, you just bring a large pot of salted water to boil, put the spaetzle maker over the top and pour the batter into the little box. Then you slide the box back and forth and the batter falls through the holes into the hot water, creating little squiggles of noodles.

3. They cook incredibly fast. You'll know when they're done when they rise to the top like this. It only takes a minute or two. I did them in several batches, or else it gets too crowded.

4. They are so versatile. Drain them in a colander and then you can use them in any recipe calling for pasta. I fried up some onions and pancetta in some melted butter and then added the spaetzle, some ground pepper and thyme and there was the dinner I'd been happily anticipating all day.

5. As hoped, it was absolutely delicious!

A couple of things to note. The recipe which I followed from the Smitten Kitchen post above, makes a LOT of spaetzle. It could easily serve four if used as the main dish, and six-eight if you were serving is just as a side dish. I'm going to use the leftovers to bake a large Spaetzle n' Cheese dish for dinner tonight. I may never buy macaroni again. Also, when moving the spaetzle maker back and forth, be careful so that the batter doesn't go down the side of the pot where it'll hit your stove element and start to burn. It did get a bit messy at times and you have to work fast, but it was completely worth it.

UPDATED: I used the leftover spaetzle in place of macaroni and it was fantastic. The spaetzle doesn't dry up overnight and takes the sauce really well. It just adds an extra creaminess to the whole dish. This is definitely replacing my old Mac n' Cheese standard.

Holiday in the Lakes. . .

2011-04-03T18:10:00.022-04:00

Life and work has been a bit hectic lately, but I just got back from a lovely holiday in England. I had great spring weather and it was so relaxing to gaze on green grass and daffodils, which were blooming everywhere. I went on a couple of wonderful walks in the Lake District, using Ambleside as a base - just fresh air, good company, breathtakingly beautiful scenery, friendly, inquisitive sheep, Jaffa Cakes at the breaks, and no electronic devices for miles. Utter bliss. First off, a walk in true Wordsworth country up to this point overlooking Grasmere.

The next day I dipped my feet in this very cold water at Angle Tarn where we stopped for lunch.

This is the gorgeous view from the top of Wansfell Pike, overlooking the town of Ambleside. It's so hard to really capture the effect, but from here all you can see are peaks everywhere and Lake Windermere to the left.

On this trip I was also visiting a friend in Liverpool who took me out to Crosby Beach at the north part of the city, which contains a really interesting art installation by artist Antony Gormley. Called Another Place, he created one hundred life-size figures of himself and placed them at various points along several kilometres of the beach. They are all staring out at the water and the effect is quiet and reflective but not intrusive. Very peaceful, though I think it might look completely different, and possibly more fearful, when the tide comes in.

My reading on this trip has been True North: In Praise of England's Better Half by Martin Wainwright - a book debunking the negative stereotypes of Northern England. It's a terrific read - I'm constantly writing down a list of places I need to visit, historical buildings to see, art galleries to go to, and even bands to check out, like The Doves. Technically, I'm a Northern girl myself having been born in Yorkshire, but I came to Canada when I was just nine months old and have lived here ever since, so even though I visit England often, there's so much about the history and culture of my birth country that I'm ignorant of. I never get tired of exploring it though.

Chaplin's 1920s Paris. . .

2011-01-17T15:28:00.005-05:00

I watched a wonderful movie last night, A Woman of Paris, the first drama that Charlie Chaplin directed. It premiered in 1923 and apart from a brief cameo, Chaplin chose not to act in it. In the DVD extras, Chaplin's biographer David Robinson introduces the film - which, though a critical success, flopped at the box office - and I was touched to learn that when Chaplin was 86, he went back and wrote a new score for the film that he had loved so much. Edna Purviance plays Marie St-Claire, a young woman who travels to Paris alone after her fiancé Jean fails to show up at the train station. A year later, she's the mistress of Pierre, a millionaire playboy, suavely portrayed by Adolphe Menjou. When Marie unexpectedly encounters Jean, now living in Paris as a struggling artist along with his disapproving mother, she has to re-evaluate what she really wants from life: love or luxury? There are so many clever and marvellous moments in this film. It's terrific at capturing the immoral, partying decadence of Paris in the twenties, the touching and humourous relationship between Marie and Pierre, the catty female friendships (a precursor to The Women?), and the ultimate tragedy and Marie's final decision. The costumes are absolutely gorgeous and despite the melodrama, there's a warmth, wit and sophistication between the characters that makes this a completely different type of film from G.W. Pabst's 1929 Pandora's Box, for example.

The DVD set also has a great documentary about the making of the film that includes an interview with Liv Ullmann talking about the film's innovations. It also includes a much later 1957 Chaplin film, The King of New York which I think I will be watching tonight.

On The Road - With Books. . .

2011-01-04T20:37:00.004-05:00

What a lovely little gem of a book. A sweet and funny middle-aged romance hitched to an exuberant ode to bookselling

Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley was first published in 1917; the edition I read is part of Melville House's Classic Novellas Series and was the perfect choice for my bus rides this week. The author's bio on the jacket flap was also fascinating. This was the first of Morley's books, but he wrote over 100 of them, including Kitty Foyle. He also founded the Baker Street Irregulars literary club and edited editions of Bartlett's Familar Quotations.

Helen McGill is a 39 year old woman who has baked too many loaves of bread in her time and devoted the last fifteen years to taking care of her ungrateful brother Andrew, himself a successful author of books containing reflections on man's relationship to nature. As such he's always leaving home for long periods of time to find literary inspiration, leaving Helen to do all the work on the farm.

When the devilish Roger Mifflin shows up with his Parnassus, a type of caravan that doubles as a travelling bookshop which he is hoping to sell to Andrew, Helen decides to buy it on a whim and have a few adventures herself. The two hit the road discussing the art of bookselling, the woes of creating an "anthology" of baked goods, and generally enjoying each other's company. Until an angry and disbelieving Andrew appears, determined to put a stop to the nonsense.

The tale is told from Helen's point of view and her gumption and growing excitement over the possibilities of her new life are inspiring and infectious. And you'll smile a lot at her self-reflections and Mifflin's philosophical and literary musings. My favourite is his idea for "Chloroform Classics" - books all written by authors over the age of forty. It's very much a reminder not to be too complacent about life; it's never too late to make a change. I have the sequel - The Haunted Bookshop - on my shelves, bought at a used bookstore many years ago. I'm eager to see what these two get up to next.