On this day. . .

Today is the 86th anniversary of the 1922 publication of Virginia Woolf's experimental novel Jacob's Room which is where the inspiration for the name of this blog came from. Julia Hedges is a minor but important character in the novel and as to the importance of her shoelaces to me, well, you'll have to read the book and come to your own conclusions (footwear was always very important to Woolf - she was an avid walker). It seems fitting that this book was published a few weeks before Armistice Day or Remembrance Day as we call it in Canada - that last sentence where all that is physically left of Jacob is his old shoes, always gets me.

Above is the original cover of the book, designed by Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell. There have been so many covers over the years. I'm rather fond of this one:

But these are either ghastly or just wrong, wrong, wrong . . .

Bookstores Around the World: Librairie Gallimard in Montreal. . .

While strolling along St. Laurent in Montreal, I came across this bookstore devoted solely to the imprints published by Gallimard. There are very few bookstores that showcase only one publisher although it's an intriguing idea. It works very well for a small press like Persephone Books that specializes in a certain type of book with a uniform look. They now have two stores and I love that they also sell books they wished they could publish; books their staff love or ones that fit in theme or period to some of the authors they do publish. They also sell a small collection of used books - again ones that fit with their vision (which more or less jives with my literary interests) and I've found a few gems there. It makes sense for university presses to run their own bookstores as well since only a scattering of their titles ever make it into the big box stores. I've been to the MIT Press Bookstore - are there any others?

Librairie Gallimard is a beautiful small bookstore and this dedication to one publisher works extremely well, mostly because one of its most prestigious imprints is Folio, which has several thousand titles in its backlist - all the French classics and a good chunk of contemporary French literature as well. The books have a bold yet simple design, dominated by a colourful photo or piece of art. They are all numbered (very classy - Persephone does this too) and the spines are all white, which gives the bookcases a striking and sophisticated look; I've always loved those older black and white French movies that involve a bookstore scene. They are irresistable pick-me-up-and-buy me books and I was happy to comply. I wanted to read something by the recent Nobel Prize winner J.M.G Le Clézio (very little of which has been translated into English which is a shame), and thought a small volume of two short stories titled Peuple du ciel would be a good place to start. Then since I loved Irène Némirovsky's Suite française, I picked up Ida - also a collection of two short stories. Finally, I couldn't resist Sur le zinc - a small collection of snippets from literature that all take place in cafes. It seemed the fitting souvenir to bring back from my mini-break to Montreal. Aren't the covers gorgeous?

Taking Care of Myself. . .

I'm spending a few days in the fabulous city of Montreal indulging in my favourite activities - walking the city streets, window shopping (and a bit of the other kind - I just can't resist the sweaters and lingerie at Simons), and drinking lots of lattes while reading in cool cafes. Today I walked down to the cobbled streets of Old Montreal just in time to catch the final day of the Sophie Calle exhibit, Prenez soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself). Calle is one of my favourite contemporary artists. Her work consists in endlessly examining the ontological aspects of people's psyches and personalities, including most often her own and it's so fascinating and clever - she's alternatively playful, thought-provoking and often extremely funny. Some of her previous projects have included following a man to Venice and photographing him; having herself followed by a private investigator; and taking a job as a chambermaid in a hotel in Venice in order to photograph the objects left in the rooms she is cleaning to create a portrait of the inhabitants. Paul Auster created a character based on Calle in his novel Leviathan attributing some of her actual art projects to his fictional artist. He also made up some projects which Calle then attempted herself and the two had an interesting creative dialogue which is recounted in the book Double Game (highly recommended - it's a quirky, beautifully designed book).

I absolutely love Sophie Calle and I was so glad to see an actual exhibit of her work (I own several of her books) which was so professionally impressive in its design and installation. In Prenez soin de vous, Calle gives a copy of a break-up letter she received from her lover to 104 women, two puppets and a parrot and beautifully photographs each recipient along with displaying or videotaping their reactions to the letter (which ends with the line "Take care of yourself"). In a nice touch the letter is also provided to visitors at the beginning of the exhibit. The women represent a broad cross-section of professions which directly influence their responses. A copy editor points out all the grammatical mistakes. A criminal psychologist does a personality profile which is definitely not complimentary. A chess player deconstructs the letter into a game. A romance author and a children's book author turn the letter into a romantic short story and fairytale respectively. Singers set the letter to music. The parrot eats it and then indignantly ruffles his feathers (absolutely hysterical). Some of the women featured are famous actresses (Miranda Richardson, Jeanne Moreau) or musical artists like Feist. The photos of the women reading the letter were varied and in some cases stunning; Calle does amazing things with lighting - in one photo, the letter seemed to glow with an energy all of its own. Not only was the exhibit visually intriguing, but it raised a lot of interesting questions about how our professions (which, let's face it, absorb the majority of our waking hours), influence how we view people and situations. Alas, there were no booksellers featured. How would that noble profession have reacted? Compared it to other great break-up letters in literature (if you liked reading this one, try. . . )? Relegated it to the remainder pile? Categorized it? (hmmm, does it belong in fiction, self-help, psychology, cultural studies, fantasy?)

The exhibit first appeared at the 2007 Venice Biennale and I read about it online. I promptly bought the accompanying book as soon as it was published in English and I'm so glad I didn't wait, because according to amazon.ca it now costs more than double what I initially paid for it. I'm guessing the reprint was costly - the book's production design would lend itself to that. Not only does it come with a DVD for all the video pieces, but the fairytale, for example, is sewn in as a mini-book within the book. The letter is also reproduced in braille and there's tons of colour photography throughout. It's one of the most unique and beautiful books that I proudly own.

In which I wrongly predict the Booker Prize yet again. . .

And in the end, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger took the Booker prize. Darn. Just scanning the newspaper coverage in Britian and the blog world however, it seems to have been quite a surprise upset with various reviewers calling it the weakest book on the list. I will eventually get around to reading it - it's quite the coup for a first-time novelist in his early thirties. God, I'm jealous.

In my dream bookstore I would have an exceptions section (have to think up a more interesting name) where I would sell the shortlisted books of major prizes and of course the winners but I'd love to put a spin on the displays. For example, I'd showcase the Booker Prize shortlisted titles on a table along with 5 shortlisted books I'd nominate myself from a time that fit the mandate of my store before the Booker Prize was established, say, 1908. Which was a pretty good year for fiction. So how about Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton, A Room With a View by E.M. Forster, The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett and a possible sleeper, Lady Athlyne by Bram Stoker (hey, it's still in print). Will White Tiger still be read in 100 years, I wonder?

My pick for the Booker - Sebastian Barry's lovely Secret Scripture. . .

I have my fingers crossed that Sebastian Barry will take the Man Booker prize on Tuesday. I just finished The Secret Scripture and the entire time I was reading it, I was in rapture and awe over the beauty of his writing. The novel alternates between two narratives - that of Roseanne, a 100 year old woman who has spent decades in a mental hospital, and her doctor, William Grene, grieving for the recent death of his wife and assigned to assess Roseanne's mental state as the hospital is closing and patients are being evaluated to see if they can be released. In doing so, he tries to dig up the original documents that chronicle Roseanne's story while his patient is herself writing her own autobiography and hiding the sheets under a loose floorboard in her room. As the novel progresses, the accounts of major events in Roseanne's life - the death of her beloved father, her secret marriage, the birth of an illegitimate child, and her initial incarceration in the asylum - differ in troubling ways. This is a novel that explores the equal challenges of constructing a human truth out of the fleeting imaginative strands of memory and the equally suspect rhetoric of possibly biased official documents. And it's about regret, betrayal and the incredible loneliness as a human condition that nevertheless has an inner self-sufficiency as its helpmate. The momentous events of Roseanne's personal life, which take place in the decades following the First World War, a period Dr. Grene calls, "the savage fairytale of life in Ireland in the twenties and thirties", is inevitably caught up in the political turmoil of that historical time. As such, this is a great follow-up to Barry's terrific WWI novel, A Long, Long Way which was also shortlisted for the Booker and darn well should have won. Hopefully Tuesday will be his day.

There's a great interview with him in The Guardian here. In it he talks about the painful secrets that reside in so many Irish families, the influence of his own family's stories on his work, and the forgotten women - such as Roseanne - who were shut away and never talked about again.

Life is a Cabaret, old chum. . .

Albert Schultz is a genius. Every city needs a visionary but one not only with a lot of ideas but the ability to make things happen. He's already been instrumental in establishing Soulpepper , one of the best theatre companies in Toronto, and has helped revitalize the Distillery District by raising funds to build the Young Centre for the Performing Arts. I was down there for three nights last weekend checking out his latest, and very successful project - the Canwest Cabaret Festival. Oh, it was so much fun. I caught a solo show by Steven Page, an amazing concert of jazz set around Duke Ellington songs (which was being taped for CBC radio - it'll run on January 1st, 2009 so catch it if you can), and my favourite - a concert devoted to the songs of Kurt Weill. One of the singers was Patricia O'Callaghan who I also saw in a solo show (where she sang in no less than five languages!) Just an amazing voice. I immediately went out and bought two of her CDs which I highly recommend. Youkali contains cabaret songs composed by Satie, Poulenc and Weill, and Slow Fox not only offers even more Weill, but ends with an awesome cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.

When Schultz was introducing the Ellington songbook set, he thanked his fifth grade teacher for showing Duke Ellington's funeral to her class on live television. It was his first exposure to the man and jazz music in general. It got me thinking about what I was listening to at that age. I was (and still am) a huge Julie Andrews fan - while other kids were listening to their Disney albums and Sharon, Lois and Braum, I instead knew all the words not only to The Sound of Music (the very first record I ever owned given to me by my grandfather, probably because he was so sick of me asking him to play it) and Mary Poppins of course, but also Camelot and My Fair Lady, which I thought was so clever lyrically and which would still rate highly on my list of best musicals of all time. Still, the one album that perhaps has been the most influential on my musical tastes, may well have been the soundtrack to the 1968 movie Star!. I was in my twenties before I got the chance to actually see the movie (unfortunately, it's not that good apart from the musical numbers), but I've known every song on the album since I was six. In the movie, Andrews plays Gertrude Lawrence and so of course Noel Coward's music is prominent. But Lawrence also starred in the Broadway musical Lady in the Dark, composed by Kurt Weill (My Ship remains a favourite song of mine and I still can get chills listening to it - at the Cabaret Festival it was given a wonderful rendition by Mike Ross).

Lawrence popped up again in quite a different story, in a recent DVD that I watched - Daphne - about Daphne du Maurier, who had an affair with Lawrence. In the movie, Janet McTeer takes on Gertie with a far more brash, non-singing performance than Julie. I love exploring and discovering these endless webs of connections.

And if you're kicking yourself for having missed the Cabaret Festival - fear not. Schultz also announced that Canwest has committed to a seven year sponsorship deal. Seven years! I told you, he's a genius.

The City at Night. . .

Some shots from Nuit Blanche, Toronto style. . . from inflated blue art installations in shopping malls. . .

. . . to light patterns on our City Hall . . .

. . .to the Horroridor - located in a subway station, this featured two facing video walls of clips from horror movies with the men screaming at the women and vice versa and the crowd caught inbetween. . .

. . . and shadows playing on walls and in windows.

I'd like to say that I lasted the whole night and saw the dawn come up, but nah. . . I was in bed by midnight. But it was fun walking through the city in the dark and instead of empty corridors, seeing it full of happy crowds.

What use is sitting alone in your room? Come see the city play. . .

It's one of those perfect fall weekends when the weather forecast is favourable, there is a bit of a nip in the air and the city is full of exciting things to do. I'm out and about and going a bit European right here in little ole Toronto.

First up is the Canwest Cabaret Festival in the Distillery District. What a fantastic idea - four days of all sorts of terrific Canadian artists performing in fifty intimate concerts lasting an hour to 90 minutes each. Tonight I caught the Queen of Puddings Music Theatre (check out their cute website which even has a yummy pudding recipe listed). Two great singers, a dynamic piano player and a program of "crazy, crunchy tunes" all composed by Canadians. There was a wonderful variety - torch songs, love songs, a tango sung in French, a short haiku and some very funny numbers. How can one not laugh at a song called Asparagus Pee? I also loved two songs -Anglicismes and Injurieux - that were set to text from Raymond Queneau's very clever book Exercises in Style, in which he relates the same incident 99 times, but using a different narrative technique for each story. I have tickets tomorrow for a Kurt Weill Songbook event and then a Duke Ellington one on Sunday and a concert by the Barenaked Ladies' Steven Page. So much fun - I hope this becomes an annual event.

Tomorrow morning I'm checking out Salon du Livre de Toronto with my bookseller friend K. I've been to umpteen English language book fairs both in Canada and the U.S. and I'll be curious to see how a French one differs. And I wonder if I'll have the nerve to open my mouth. I can read French fairly well with a dictionary nearby, but I'm hopeless at speaking it and my accent is atrocious.

And then after the Kurt Weill concert, it's off to check out Nuit Blanche (well for as long as I can stay up, that is). The city at night becomes a huge canvas and stage for contemporary art exhibits, dance, and outdoor art installations - all lasting from sunset Saturday night to sunrise on Sunday morning. It's going to be wonderful to wander the streets filled with the city's art lovers. I'm looking forward to encountering the completely unexpected.

These are Lean Times. . .

And more Coward! God, I'm loving this city right now. Cinematheque Ontario has a great David Lean retrospective playing in October and November. I'll definately be seeing Brief Encounter on the big screen - it's one of my favourite all-time movies and I'm excited to see the restored print. Other movies associated with Noel Coward that are screening are Blithe Spirit, This Happy Breed and In Which We Serve. Yep, I've got tickets to all of them - plus I can't resist seeing Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen as well.

This film series was previously shown at the British Film Institute in London. One of my favourite film critics, David Thomson, wrote an appreciation of Lean in the Guardian, that you can read here. In particular, he raves about two of Lean's lesser known early films (which are not available on DVD), The Passionate Friends (also with Trevor Howard!) and Madeleine. Both look fascinating and I'm so excited to get the chance to view them.

Bookstores Around the World - Spadina Road Books, in my own back yard. . .

While I try to support independent brick and mortar stores when buying new books, there' s nothing like the internet for finding rare and out of print books. Still, it's nice to occasionally browse a new (to me, that is) used bookstore. I had received an online catalogue via e-mail from Spadina Road Books and phoned them up to inquire about a book that intrigued me. Since I was in the area, I dropped by today during my lunch hour. They have a very nice fiction section and a whole bookcase devoted to books about publishing - many of them from the period of this blog's focus. I have a small collection of these and am always looking to add to it. The books have been well taken care of; protective covers envelope most of the dust jackets. I also love a bookseller with a sense of humour. Here's how the store describes a 1957 edition of George Moore's letters to Lady Cunard in very poor condition. I love the final selling line.

Ex-library copy. Boards and endpapers have extensive adhesive stains from where the dustjacket had been taped down. Library stamp on the copyright page, circulation card on rear free endpaper, circulation pocket on rear pastedown. The dustjacket has complementary adhesive stains along the flap edges, rear flap is mostly missing, dustjacket is rubbed and edgeworn and there is a location label on spine. In spite of the wear to the dustjacket and boards, the text is clean and intact, of course, since according to the date due slip, this book was never once taken out of the library. Worth owning as an exemplar of the librarian's destructive craft and the lack of interest on the part of the reading public.

Nope, wasn't tempted. But you can't blame them for trying. And it did give me the best laugh of the day.

Of course the sign of a good bookstore is when one goes in with the intention of picking up one specific book and comes out with five instead. My target book was a tiny collection of letters from the publisher Martin Secker to D. H. Lawrence from 1911-1929. But I also picked up Publishers on Publishing, a 1961 anthology edited by Gerald Gross; a reprint of John Middleton Murray's 1936 collection of essays on Shakespeare; a Modern Library edition of e.e. cumming's amazing WWI novel The Enormous Room; and The Lost Library: The Autobiography of a Culture by Walter Mehring which looks to be a fascinating read. From the jacket flap copy:

The Lost Library of the title is that body of books which bade fair, up to the fatal year of 1914, to stand as the bulwark of a permanent, ever-growing tradition of enlightenment and progress. . . Mr. Mehring has built the tragic history of Western culture upon a semi-narrative framework, as the refugee narrator reassembles the books of his father's library after receiving them in exile. . .as book after book is unpacked and re-examined, it seems as though the story of the last hundred years in Europe, as revealed in its literary history, were retelling itself.

Coward's Tonight. . . Next Summer!

I am OVER THE MOON! The Shaw Festival announced its 2009 line-up and what a terrific one it is. In particular, they are putting on ALL 10 short plays of Noel Coward's Tonight at 8:30. All of them. All in one season! I saw a production of Still Life at the Shaw a few seasons ago as their lunchtime play, but to see the whole series! I am in awe and so excited. They are the perfect company to tackle this.

From the press release:

Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell officially announced the Shaw Festival’s 2009 season today. In 2009 The Shaw takes on a monumental and historic project with full productions of each play in Noel Coward’s famous Tonight at 8:30 collection. The Shaw’s 2009 productions represent the first time all ten short plays have been performed in repertory by a professional company since they were first produced by London’s Phoenix Theatre in 1935-36. The plays will be performed in sets of three, one on each of the Festival’s Niagara-on-the-Lake stages, with the tenth, the rarely produced Star Chamber, being the lunchtime production in the Royal George. And to celebrate this idea for the event that it is, on two separate occasions, we will present all ten in one day – an event we are appropriately naming “Mad Dogs and Englishmen”.
Ms. Maxwell said of the collection: “As the idea of doing all of Coward’s Tonight at 8:30 came to me, and as I reread the plays, I was struck that each one is a brilliant jewel – like the best short stories – some well known, some not. As is typical of Coward – who was always pushing the envelope in both form and content – the ten plays vary hugely. There are out-and-out comedies, heart-wrenching dramas, fantasy musicals and historical tales. Coward is a brilliant miniaturist, a master storyteller, and any group of these plays, seen together, is a truly satisfying evening at the theatre. The experience of seeing them in one fell swoop, for those who are game, will be thrilling indeed.

Oh, I'm game. I'm game.

The rest of the season also looks great - Sondheim's Sunday in the Park With George, O'Neill's A Moon For the Misbegotten and Osborne's The Entertainer among others. You can read about the full line-up here.

I have watched part of the BBC's production of Tonight at 8:30 in the Noel Coward Collection, which I own. But quite frankly, it stars Joan Collins who was absolutely ghastly in the few bits that I saw. Her portrayal of Mrs. Bagot, the owner of the station teashop in Still Life, honestly made me nauseous. Which is not to say that the DVD set is not worth owning for the other productions on it. In particular, I liked A Song at Twilight with Deborah Kerr and Paul Scofield. And there are a number of radio plays on the discs, including Post Mortem, Coward's rarely performed play about a soldier returning from the dead in the 1920s to find that the society that came out of the war wasn't worth his sacrifice. The extras also include some wonderful Coward interviews.

Gender in Modernism and the Movies. . .

I've just gotten my hands on two big, meaty anthologies that promise hours of interesting reading (and will probably lead me along the path to many more books). Gender in Modernism edited by Bonnie Kime Scott is a companion piece to her earlier anthology The Gender of Modernism, which is practically a bible for anyone studying modernist writing (check out her web of intersecting lines near the front of the book, her "tangled mesh of modernists" showing how all these amazing writers were connected to each other - absolutely fascinating stuff). This new book - all 872 weighty pages of it - has excepts organized into 21 different parts, each selected and with an introduction by a different academic in the field, many of whom I have previously read and admired such as Julia Briggs, Suzanne Clark, Janet Lyon and Claire M. Tylee. The topics are far-reaching and international. Lots of pieces on activism and suffragism, and the impact of the First World War, which includes an extract from Virginia Woolf's holography of "The Prime Minister" - an early draft of what would become Mrs. Dalloway, focusing on Septimus Smith's post-traumatic stress disorder. Another particularly interesting looking section is entitled "Mediumship, Automatism and Modernist Authorship". And there are extracts from the drama of the period, and essays on dance, painting and film.

The final section of Scott's anthology, "Cineastes and Modernists: Writing on Film in 1920s London", leads me straight into Red Velvet Seat: Women's Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema edited by Antonia Lant and Ingrid Periz - another 800 plus page doorstopper. I've been salivating over the selections in this collection, many by some of my favourite writers. Here are essays such as "Why I Go to the Cinema" by Elizabeth Bowen; "The Wanton Playgoer" by Djuna Barnes; "The Mask and the Movietone" by H.D. and "The Film Gone Male" by Dorothy Richardson. Under a section entitled "Cinema as a Power" are essays by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Marie Stopes, Rebecca West, and Anita Loos. Wearing "The Critic's Hat" are Louella O. Parsons, Colette, Janet Flanner, Katherine Anne Porter and Bryher. I'll certainly be reading the section, "In the Shadow of War" in its entirety. And along with analyses of the impact of cinema on culture and society, there are also pieces by actresses, and women directors, cinematographers, and screenwriters. Emily Post even gives advice on how to politely make your way across a row filled with people to your seat in the middle:

Remember also not to drag anything across the heads of those sitting in front of you. At the moving pictures, especially when it is dark and difficult to see, a coat on an arm passing behind a chair can literally devastate the hair-dressing of a lady occupying it.

Delicious, simply delicious.

Ah, Paris. . .

A nice write-up in Maitresse on this new book by David Burke - Writers in Paris: Literary Lives in the City of Light. As she writes:

Burke's book fills a certain niche on the shelf of books written about literary Paris: not only a walking tour of French literature, or of Paris in letters, Burke has produced a geographically organized catalogue of writers' writings on Paris. The reader is led street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, as Burke tracks the ghosts of writers past, pinning down what happened where in the long history of literature produced by Parisian writers, punctuated with citations of great Parisian moments in French literature.

It looks like a very interesting study. The most recent book I've read set in Paris was Zola's The Ladies' Paradise about the rise of a huge department store told through the stories of its visionary owner and a poor sales clerk who he falls in love with. It was fascinating on late 19th century consumerism and marketing ideas and gender, class and work issues, if the story was somewhat awkward and unconvincing.

Four Firth Films. . .

It was a week of Colin Firth; after Easy Virtue, I also saw him in Michael Winterbottom's new film, Genova which was a rather disturbing movie to watch - Firth plays a father who takes his two girls to Genova for a year to recover from the recent death of their mother in a car crash. The focus of the story is on Mary, the younger eight-year old, who feels guilty for having caused the accident and who believes her mother still appears to her when she's alone. There's a constant unease that permeates the movie as Mary gets lost among the dark, narrow, twisting streets of the old city, and a scene set amidst the noise and confusion of ten lanes of traffic is also harrowing. It reminded me a little bit of Kate Winslet movie, Hideous Kinky. I could appreciate what Winterbottom was trying to do with the movie, but having recently been rear-ended myself (fortunately no one was hurt - I was just a little shaken), this was probably not a good movie for me to see right now.

To shake it off, I saw two more Firth movies that have recently come out on DVD. Helen Hunt's directorial debut, Then She Found Me, has Firth also playing a father who has been abandoned by his wife and though he loves his kids, he's frustrated and angry that he has had to take sole responsibility for them. He falls in love with Hunt's character whose life is in turmoil - husband has just left her, her adoptive mother has died and her birth mother has suddenly appeared in her life. And she's pregnant with her husband's child. It's quite a sweet little film exploring themes of abandonment, longing and family and Firth is once again given the type of romantic lines that would seem corny delivered by any other actor, but somehow come across as sincere from his lips.

My fourth Firth was a filmed stage production of D.H. Lawrence's play The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, starring Zoe Wannamaker, Stephen Dillane and Firth, who plays the brutish, alcoholic coal miner husband. Not the best acting I've ever seen from him; his Northern accent was not terribly convincing and he spent most of his time thumping tables and shouting. However, he made a lovely, almost angelic corpse, even covered in coal dust. The DVD also comes with a version of Lawrence's The Rainbow, starring Imogen Stubbs, which I haven't yet watched but will soon. And I have a hankering now to dig out Ken Russell's movie Women in Love. Haven't watched it in ages, but I loved Glenda Jackson in it. Oh dear, I certainly don't often get into a D. H. Lawrence mood.

Mad About the Boy. . .

The only decent shot I managed to get from my perch way up in the balcony and Colin had to blink! Last night I was at the Toronto Film Festival world premiere of Easy Virtue, based on Noel Coward's 1924 play. From left to right in the photo is director Stephan Elliott (best known for directing the fun and campy The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), and stars of the film Ben Barnes, Jessica Biel and of course Colin Firth. Kristin Scott Thomas who also stars was alas, unable to make the screening.

Glamour aside, it was a very good adapation and well worth seeing when it hits theatres. The story remains essentially the same as the play - John (played by Barnes) unexpectedly brings home his older, more sophisticated wife Larita (Biel), to his staid and shocked British family. Larita then wreaks havoc with her wild and decadent ways but in the ensuing battle, particularly with her formidable mother-in-law (played wonderfully by Scott Thomas - a cross between the Maggie Smith character in Gosford Park and Emma Thompson's recent Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited), she's oppressed and stifled by her new environment and decides to escape - but not before one last defiant gesture. As you'd expect from material dervived from a Coward play, the dialogue is witty and frothy, but Elliott has added many new scenes with some very polished and comic gags and there is some intriguing camera work (watch for a terrific shot of Scott Thomas looming on the shiny surface of a black snooker ball as it rolls towards her and the audience). Some of the characters have been expanded (especially the father played by Firth, who becomes a disillusioned war veteran with survivor guilt). The ending has also changed somewhat, but I don't think anyone will complain - it's rather delicious. Firth fans will also be extremely happy with this film - there's a wonderfully sexy scene where he dances the tango with Biel. Gasps escaped from the hundreds of female fans in the audience - me included. It's not often that a film can improve on the original source material, but this one really does it. I had a marvellous time.

Glorious Claude Cahun. . .

This how one's library grows. I first became intrigued by the surrealist photography of Claude Cahun when I saw one of her self-portraits gracing the cover of Mary Ann Caws's book Glorious Eccentrics. I know Caws as an author from some of her previous books on the Bloomsbury group, Dora Carrington (another obsession of mine) and painters and poets of the era. So I had to buy the book, which is a collection of portraits of seven women who influenced Modernism. It's very good. So then I read about Cahun's longterm relationship with her partner Marcel Moore and how the two women moved to Jersey and subsequently became involved in the Resistance movement when the Germans occupied the island during the Second World War. And I found don't kiss me: The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. And bought that. Okay, I haven't had time to read it yet, but I have looked at all the photos. They are stunningly unique and compelling. She was obsessed with her own creation - changing her looks and dressing up as other characters, not to be someone else, but to explore different aspects of her self. She also played a lot with gender roles and androgny along with different photography angles, mirrors, etc. Her work is beautifully strange, and thought provoking. It's mesmerizing.

And then The Literary Saloon pointed me in the direction of the latest edition of The Quarterly Conversation which had an essay by Lauren Elkin on her literary work, which happened to mention that MIT had recently translated one of her books, Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions, which is described as an anti-memoir. It sounds so interesting. So I think I need to get a copy of this as well. Elkin's essay is well worth reading and gives a good biographical overview. So many amazing women artists in the first half of the 20th century. Such incredible life stories.

In my fantasy bookstore I picture a very white wall with white plate rails stacked horizontally up to the ceiling where I'd display face out all the books I could find either by or about the surrealists, that had black and white covers of either artwork or photography. It would look stunning. Maybe behind the fantasy cash register.

Easy Virtue at Toronto Film Festival. . .

I'm going to try (and will most likely fail - sigh), to get tickets to the movie version of Noel Coward's Easy Virtue that is playing at the Toronto Film Festival. It stars Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas. Good enough for me. Hopefully it won't take too long for the film to be released in the cinemas. No trailer available online yet, but you can read more about it here. Firth was also in the film of another Coward re-make - Relative Values, starring Julie Andrews, who, love her as I do, just wasn't right for the part. Still, I own the DVD and it's a pleasurable way to pass an hour or two. And Sophie Thompson is terrific in it.


UPDATED: Whoo-hoo! This thing has been sold out, but someone must have returned a ticket because while checking the website this morning, the Gala screening was up for grabs! And I grabbed. I don't know if Colin Firth might be in the audience.... I'll report back. I'm so excited!

Re-reading: The Secret Garden. . .

It's been a goal of mine to consciously make time to re-read books from my bookworm past to see if I react differently to them many years later. This morning, a pot of tea at the ready, I tackled Frances Hodgson Burnett's beloved 1911 classic The Secret Garden. It must have been over thirty years since I first read this. It was a favourite of mine as a child because I was born (although not bred) in Yorkshire and have always kept a certain romantic notion of the moors in my imaginative consciousness. I found that I remembered the first half of the book extremely well - the sullen Mary Lennox's first arrival in England and her lonely first days until she finds a way into the secret garden that has been locked up for ten years until, with the help of the Yorkshire lad Dickon, she brings it, herself and Colin, the sickly master of the manor, back to life.

Reading it again, I'm struck by how many echoes of the Bronte sisters reverberate through the pages. The reverence and love of the moors is constant of course, but Colin's strange crying in the night as he's hidden away, not in an attic but a forbidden corridor, surely is a nod to Jane Eyre. As is the "voice" calling back Mr. Craven from his aimless European wandering (I had completely forgotten this entire chapter). I was also intrigued by the insistence of "Magic" as a life-force that Colin calls upon to make things happen. There are certainly religous implications in the novel, and today, it's what we'd probably call the power of positive thinking. But time and again, the word "Magic" with a capital M is repeated. Which is interesting having just read Hartley's The Go-Between, about a child who believes in his magical powers and the ability to put curses on people. That novel is written much later than Burnett's, but set only ten years earlier. So was there an intense interest in the occult then, particularly among children? Hmmmm.

I also found myself thinking of the first part of Rupert Brooke's famous sonnet, "The Soldier", whenever Mary's request for "a bit of earth" is referred to.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

Dickon is thirteen in the novel - he'd be sixteen when the war started. What would have happened to him? And after finishing the last chapter, I'm surprised by how suddenly Mary disappears from what has been mostly her story. Now that she has helped heal Colin and he's reunited with his father, is that the end of her usefulness and she can just fade into the background again?

The Go-Between. . .

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

I've heard the phrase many times - now I've finally finished the novel, The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley that begins with this famous line. First published in 1953, it's set in the hot and almost continually sunny summer of 1900, a "Golden Age". Leo Colston is approaching thirteen and is staying with a rich schoolmate at his stately home for a few weeks. Insecure and naive, he starts taking messages between his friend's older sister and her secret lover - a farmer, handsome and virile, but of course of the wrong class. Tragedy ensues.

I was hooked right from the prologue as Leo, now an elderly man in his sixties ruminates on that summer and how it shaped (for the worst) his entire life. He imagines a conversation with his 12 year old self who reproaches him:

"But you have had half a century to get over it! Half a century, half the twentieth century, that glorious epoch, that golden age I bequeathed to you!".

And his answer breaks your heart:

"Has the twentieth century," I should ask, "done so much better than I have? When you leave this room, which I admit is dull and cheerless, and take the last bus to your home in the past, if you haven't missed it - ask yourself whether you found everything so radiant as you imagined it. Ask yourself whether it has fulfilled your hopes. You were vanquished, Colston, you were vanquished, and so was your century, your precious century that you hoped so much of."

That almost sums up the core questions of this novel - can one ever really make that last bus to the past? And do we want to? Colston's recollections of the boy he was - his innocence and vanity, coupled with his awkward insecurities are so beautifully and delicately portrayed. Hartley has vividly captured the constant heat of the summer, the tension of a village cricket match (the only British novel I know which prefaces the description of the match with a helpful summary of the rules of the game), and the complicated relationships within a family and among the different classes. A strong sense of the supernatural (as experienced in a child's imagination) and an elegy for the historical dead, both past and future (several of the characters will die in the First World War) permeates this lovely novel. A completely absorbing and thoughtful reading experience.

Modern Architecture. . .

As a relaxation exercise, I oddly find documentaries or movies about architecture to be just the thing for a flop on the sofa type of evening. There's something soothing about cameras lingering on the worn face of a stone carving or the vaulted roof of a church. And I'm grateful to be able to see in close-up the fine details that one would not be able to see with the naked eye, or would miss in the tourist shuffle. I've been watching Antonio Gaudí, by Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara - a documentary described as more of a "visual poem". I had thought of Gaudí as being more modern; it was a surprise to learn he died in 1926. The DVD also comes with a BBC documentary on the architect's work, narrated by art critic Robert Hughes, which was a good introduction. Barcelona and the famous Park Guell is definately on the list of places I want to visit someday.

I also have enjoyed the PBS documentary on Frank Lloyd Wright, by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. I watched this after reading Nancy Horan's captivating novel Loving Frank - a fictionalized account of the architect's relationship with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, who left her husband and children to be with Wright. The novel explores many of the emotional and societal conflicts facing women at that time as Mamah struggles with her love for Frank against her own need for intellectual fulfillment and her guilt over abandoning her children. I didn't know how the relationship ended (and I won't give it away here) but it's quite shocking. The documentary was extremely interesting on Wright's personal life after Mamah, which was just as rocky. Of course, there's an awful lot about his buildings and houses as well.

Bookstores around the World - Idlewild Books

One of the things I want to do on this blog is showcase innovative, interesting and just plain beautiful bookstores around the world. Three Percent tipped me to a New York bookstore that I will definately visit next time I'm in the city. Idlewild Books calls itself a "bookstore about places" and specializes in travel and international literature. They organize their sections by country. What a terrific and inspiring idea; I love reading the literature of a place before visiting - it completely enhances the experience.

A Graphic look at the early 20th century. . .

I've started reading Charley's War - a series of reprints of comic strips by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun that originally ran in Battle Action Weekly in the 1970s. The strips begin in June 1916 and follow the naive 16 year old Charley Bourne and his experiences in the trenches. They've been collected into four volumes so far, with a fifth one out this fall. I've finished the first volume and was quite moved, especially as it covers the Battle of the Somme. There's a bit of over the top (no pun intended) machoism and some fairly improbable coincidences in the story line, but the authors are trying to cover all aspects of the war, including the homefront, and it definately is by no means glorifying the war. It was entertaining and informative and I'm hooked enough to want to read on.

Graphic novels are so popular now and every bookstore has a section. Mine would too. I've come across several already that would fit the bill. The Salon by Nick Bertozzi takes us back to 1907 Paris where a killer is targeting avant-garde painters. So Gertrude and Leo Stein with the help of Picasso, Erik Satie, Alice B. Toklas and Apollinaire, set out to find the murderers. Looks like fun. Martin Rowson has written a witty and noir version of Eliot's The Wasteland involving the L.A. cop Christopher Marlowe - a pastiche of Philip Marlowe. HarperCollins have brought out several Agatha Christie mysteries as graphic novels. I haven't read one of these yet - I wonder if they can get all the intricate plotting just right. Or would it be easier to guess the "graphic" murderer? And then there are the Proust graphic novels - I have the first two volumes and they are quite well done. Doubtless there a lot more to add to this list. Must investigate.