This week something really heartening happened. My fattening baby is beginning his night sleep earlier, thus I have a new window of time and lo, up sprung a meadow! The sudden bloom of quietly nurtured things has such a unique satisfaction.
(Meadow shadowbox, 12″x12″, Dutch book and brown paper)
I was so happy on Friday, to be digging around the paperback section of Halfprice Books. One of my finds was a little collection of prose musings and essays by Laurie Lee, who authored one of my very favourite books Cider With Rosie.
Cider With Rosie is a childhood memoir whose resonance goes beyond its beautiful, lyrical writing. It evokes life in a rural British village sitting unsuspectingly on the cusp of great change, brought about by cars, media and of course, World War II and its concomitant societal alterations. As such, it has become somewhat of a swan song for a way of life.
Lee’s essays are brilliant pieces of writing, punctuated by heart soaring truths couched in straightforward but keenly selected observations. However, in the more revealing form of straight prose, it is easy to see that at times, he was somewhat obdurate in the face of societal change. He became a father late and in his tender and truthful letter to his daughter, The Firstborn, there are flashes of suspicion of new fangled ideas.
Oh we’re often pretty rubbish with New Fangled Things. The internet will rot your brain you know and before that it was video games, television and Elvis’ pelvis. Lamenting change is entirely natural and often valid. Until, that is, it becomes unhelpful and irrelevant. The problem is that unless it is in your power to reverse change, endlessly grieving its arrival contributes nothing.
Whilst I was happily stocking up on paperbacks I questioned my pursuit of a little library to call my own. For someone who lives between nations, filling a bookshelf is highly impractical. A Kindle would really make more sense.
When it comes to words, even the Kindle is the littlest element in a cultural shift. Nowadays, everything is different because of internet reading. We read short things, quick things; the less scrolling the better. Everything talks to each other on the internet in a much more loud and immediate way. Titles and first paragraphs are more important [click to read the whole article] than cover illustrations and backcover blurb. It’s all hooks and hyperlinks.
I read an article in the Guardian this week about Amanda Hocking who has sold over a million books self-publishing on the internet (the Arctic Monkeys of the literary world). Viral recommendation has become a major gatekeeper in publishing as well as music. The routes are different, the way is different, words will inevitably be used and formed differently and it’s good, bad, beautiful, ugly and wonderfully alive.
Yet still, I find myself picking through paperbacks in Halfprice Books and wanting to own a hard copy of every book I ever love. Funnily enough, the reason is partly Laurie Lee. I read Cider With Rosie for comfort, almost in circles and its physical presence is part of that. I remember the pages. I return to sections of other books for their brilliance, for the perfect words they offer for certain moments or truths. Or for their sensations. And what’s more, after each few years of living, books have different things to say to you. I don’t just read my books, I converse with them. Then there’s the completer-finisher’s satisfaction of being able to see one’s progress through a tome. And the covers! Who can resist this distinct brand of retro-glory? I know that many people feel the same about books, they are so loved that I don’t think that the form will die anytime soon.
I’m allowing myself, therefore, to indulge my paperback collecting but I don’t want to become a stalwart about their superiority as a way of reading. My children are the inheritors of this new world and in more ways than just books. I will be doing them a disservice if I don’t prepare them for it, snobbishly making them play with sticks in the garden like it’s 1982 and boasting to other parents that my corduroy-clad darlings think that a Wii is something you do in the toilet. I plan to build a house that homes the different generations, the both/and scenario of the cherished furled page and all the wiki, wiki, wah, wahs of the world wide web we’re spinning in.
I’ll be the cool mum who shouts out “L.O.L!” at the school play.
I’m excited about reading this because this gent wrote one of my favourite book of short stories (I blogged about it here). I liked it so much that I sent Mr. Wilson some origami birds folded from old book pages as a way of saying “well done”. This is Kevin Wilson’s debut novel and he is a writer from the south of the U.S, making his way…and I hope he does.
I’m being simple at the moment. I don’t know if it is all the uncertainty (visa applications pending) or the new baby or just a time to reprioritise but I have slowed right down and for now, I have let a lot of things go.
I have, however, been spending a lot of my snatched moments reading. I’m reading a book about Medieval female mystics (eye-opening!) and in November I noisily struggled through Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. It’s dazzling and darkly clever but I didn’t like it– the cleverness is heavy and there is very little warmth in the book. All of the characters are mean, flawed-without-grace and all of their foibles are more grotesque than humorous. It’s misanthropic and complicated and mystical without being transcendent.
My other simple-times activity has been making some new postcards for my little, growing postcard collection:
And other than that I have been hanging with my small ones in the afternoons and watching a lot of Parenthood in the evenings whilst my youngest fills his boots, ready for the night.
I really like Parenthood for the following reasons: 1. I come from a large extended family and sometimes I really miss being around that dynamic and so I like watching the big everyone-at-dinner-teasing-each-other scenes 2. I like the fact that the storylines take unexpected downturns. Not in a depressing way but in a true-to-life way. 3. I don’t know if it’s the scriptwriting or that the actors are great at ad-libbing but the dialogue is naturalistic, especially all the tiny verbal quips that happen in real life but are rarely included in scripted lines.
1941, the year that gave us Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and David Hill. Yes, my old man just became a septuagenarian and in honour of his birthday I did an illustration to go with his moniker Mad Old Bugger which he esoterically abbreviates to MOBgr. I can’t think why (ahem) but I wanted to do my illustration in a Raymond Briggs-esque style.
The real test for me was asking my four-year-old son who was in my drawing and he guessed it straight away: Success! Except that I totally fudged the hand.
Like the little engine that tried again I then provided a hands illustration for Hold Vintage.
This provides me with a brilliant excuse to direct you to the Hold Vintage facebook page where Stephanie is showcasing 365 days of vintage. Now, Steph is a great friend of mine and I can attest that she really does look that chic-fantastic all the time, even in the hottest heat of summer when the rest of us have given up and resorted to dudedom.
(I must mention, Steph is currently exploring Europe and so I think her daily 365 posts are going to have a catch up in a week or so, but the rest of the time she posts every day.)
This afternoon, I walked into the beautiful light and made a wee video:
My son is really interested in skeletons at the moment. In his four-year-old mind, there is nothing spooky or ghoulish about them, he is simply matter-of-factly interested in what things do and don’t have skeletons.
One afternoon last week, my son was where the wildness was and so off we went to see some rib cage action at a small local Day of the Dead parade. Being a Brit, I am not familiar with the custom and I’ll admit that I’ve never been that attracted to it. Needless to say, I was not expecting to be left weeping by the spectacle.
It did not have a creepy, sminky pinky vibe as I’d feared; it was full of defiance and fighting spirit. The grief was there, along with the refusal to end things there. It had resurrection hope, the sense of a story that continues further than lifespans and triumph. Yes, it was triumphant and you don’t get to be triumphant if life has never socked you a blow. I felt intensely alone and intensely not alone in the same moment and it made me cry.
Here is a little clip of the parade to the music of Bobby Jealousy, Austin’s newest and most triumph-full band. I say that because when I saw them the other week I had the same feeling; their songs are fighty-feisty-joyful-ballsy and you can feel the history and weight behind them, they are like their very own Day of the Dead parade-on-stage.
Hannah Stoney is a British artist and writer.
She paints, illustrates, curates, collaborates, cuts up old books and is working on a collection of short stories. More...
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