Story and Meta-story

"Buttercup's mother hesitated, then put her stew spoon down. (This was after stew, but so is everything. When the first man first clambered from the slime and made his first home on land, what he had for supper that first night was stew.)" (p.42)

Don't you just love it when the book really lives up to the film (and vice versa). Jacob bought Monkey a copy of The Princess Bride by William Goldman for Christmas and we just finished reading it, and having loved the film for many years it was wonderful to find it a very satisfying read. (For full disclosure I mainly love the film because of the presence of Fred Savage from The Wonder Years that I watched religiously when the children were small.) It is a very clever narrative, because it sucks you into the story of the book before it sucks you in to the story in the book. In an extensive and detailed 'introduction' Goldman tells us of his childhood link to the fictitious author S Morgenstern and his epic tale of (equally fictitious) Florin. The Princess Bride is a story he knows only second hand, it having been read aloud by his father, so it comes as a shock when, wanting to share it with his own son, he finds it is not the book he thought he knew. Throughout the book there are then numerous interjections by Goldman telling you about the edits he made to the story and the significance of certain aspects of the story to Florinese history. It is delightful to find that the story has all the humorous quirky characters and incidents almost exactly as they appear in the film, though you have the added interest of the back story of all the main characters, explaining how they came to be where they were for their involvement in this particular tale. 

The Sicilian, the Turk and the Spaniard kidnap Princess Buttercup to start war between Florin and Guilder, but hot on their tail is the man in black, also known as the Dread Pirate Roberts, and closely behind him are Prince Humperdinck and Count Rugen. The Fire Swamp, the Rodents Of Unusual Size, the pain machine, the Miracle pill and the holocaust cloak all take their anticipated part in the unfolding of the events, although people often appear far more dead than they turn out to be. Just as in the film there are also little 'aside' exchanges between William and his dad, reminding you again that this is a tale to be told, parent to child, a shared experience that travels down the generations. It reminds you that that is what stories are for, and that each child's understanding of a story is shaped by their parent. 

He takes the meta-story to a whole new level with an argument with Stephen King about who is going to edit the second story, Buttercup's Baby, the first chapter of which is included at the end. I did not like this inclusion as I have felt that such stories are best ended with the ride into the sunset, you are not supposed to worry about what happened next. As so often I find the story marred by its dearth of women characters and the way Buttercup is such a passive victim of events, but I'll try not to be a party pooper about it. Anyway, go read, enjoy.

""No one could be following us yet?" the Spaniard asked.
"No one," the Sicilian assured him. "It would be inconceivable."
"Absolutely inconceivable?"
"Absolutely, totally, and, in all other ways, inconceivable," the Sicilian reassured him. "Why do you ask?"
"No reason," the Spaniard replied. "It's only that I just happened to look back and something's there."
They all whirled.
Something was indeed there. Less than a mile behind them across the moonlight was another sailing boat, small, painted what looked like black, with a giant sail that billowed black in the night, and a single man at the tiller. A man in black." (p.98)

Orlando

Is it just me or is Virginia Woolf's profile some kind of cultural icon? I have struggled to get through Orlando; I loved Mrs Dalloway but drowned in The Waves and never managed To The Lighthouse (though it is still vaguely on the list). You have, I suppose, to remember that Woolf is all about the writing, and actually when I think about it, Orlando is about writing, being a writer. Orlando struggles to be a writer, for five hundred years. Decades seem to pass where s/he sits and contemplates the trees, and in some ways the gift of time seems so essential, and something that writers often struggle with the most. It is what Woolf also writes about in A Room of One's Own, both physical and psychological space being so necessary for writing.

"Of the two forces which alternately, and what is more confusing still, at the same moment, dominate out unfortunate numbskulls - brevity and diuturnity - Orlando was sometimes under the influence of the elephant-footed deity, then of the gnat-winged fly. Life seemed to him of prodigious length. Yet even so, it went like a flash. But even when it stretched longest and the moments swelled biggest and he seemed to wander alone in the deserts of vast eternity, there was not time for the smoothing out and deciphering of those thickly scored parchments which thirty years among men and women had rolled tight in his heart and brain." (p.60)

""I'll be blasted," he said, "if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good or indifferent, I'll write, from this day forward, to please myself."; and here he made as if he were tearing  whole budget of papers across and tossing them in the face of that sneering loose-lipped man. Upon which, as cur ducks if you stoop to shy a stone at hime, Memory ducked her effigy of Nick Greene out of sight; and substituted for it - nothing whatever." (p.62-3)

From her position of immense privilege Orlando gets to observe the world, and Woolf uses her centuries of life to allow learning and much reflection on the human condition. Some things that I came across struck such a chord with modern politics:

"No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make other believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party - for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subservience rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue - but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditchwater." (p.94)

As Orlando, now a woman, returns to England from Turkey she sits on the ship and begins to realise the implications of her transformation:

""And that's the last oath I shall ever be able to swear," she thought; "once I set foot on English soil. And I shall never be able to crack a man over the head, or tell him he lies in his teeth, or draw miswrote and run him through the body, or sit amongst my peers, or wear a coronet, or walk in a procession, or sentence a man to death, or lead an army, or prance down Whitehall on a charger, or wear seventy-two different medals on my breast. All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour out tea and ask my lords how they like it. D'you take sugar? D'you take cream?" And mincing  out the words, she was horrified to perceive how low an opinion she was forming of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her pride to belong." (p.100)

And a little further on, still thinking of her change from man to woman, but reflections that have some interesting insights into the whole transgender issue, clothes being somehow symbolic for how people present their gender to the outside world:

"The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman's dress and of a woman's sex. And perhaps in this she was expressing rather more openly than usual - openness was indeed the soul of her nature - something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed. For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result everyone has had experience; but here we leave the general question and note only the odd effect it had in the particular case of Orlando herself." (p.121)

Though not, I felt, specifically a feminist treatise she does dwell periodically on the lot of woman, and, here, on the impact of the now victorian age on the once wild and reckless Orlando:

"So she stood mournfully at the drawing-room window (Bartholomew had so christened the library) dragged down by the weight of the crinoline which she had submissively adopted. It was heavier and more drab than any dress she had yet worn. None had ever so impeded her  movements. No longer could she stride though the garden with her dogs, or run lightly to the high mound and fling herself beneath the oak tree. Her skirts collected damp leaves and straw. The plumed hat tossed on the breeze. The thin shoes were quickly soaked and mud-caked. Her muscles had lost their pliancy. She became nervous lest there should be robbers behind the wainscot and afraid, for the first time in her life, of ghosts in the corridors. All these things inclined her, step by step, to submit to the new discovery, whether Queen Victoria's or another's, that each man and each woman has another allotted to it for life, whom it supports, by whom it is supported, till death do them part. It would be a comfort, she felt, to lean; to sit down; yes, to lie down; never, never, never to get up again." (p158-9)

Ok, I'm going to leave it there because the book has to go back to the library and I have in no way captured anything of the essence of Orlando. I read somewhere that it is supposed to be a love letter to Vita Sackville West; the photographs through the book are her. It is about a man who becomes a woman, so in one sense presents the different life experience of the genders, but as I began saying it is also about the struggles of a poet and a human being to get to grips with the big questions. A short book but dense with images and ideas, it could take a decade of serious study, and I'm sure someone out there is doing just that.

Much Ado: Shakespeare Part Two

I am on leave this week so, having bought tickets to see Twelfth Night, we decided to have a week of Shakespeare experiences. Monkey is a huge fan of Joss Whedon and thus we continued with his 2012 version of 'Much Ado About Nothing'. It sticks with the original language but the setting and style of filming does much to make the play very accessible to a 21st century audience; Shakespeare can often come across as people standing on the stage talking, whereas in this version the action feels much more naturalistic. It was filmed, apparently, at his home in California and as such feels something like Hollywood movie, rich people hangout out in their very beautiful home and agonising over who loves who, the sexual tension between Beatrice and Benedick muted somewhat by the use of words like 'woo' and 'thine'. In the same way as Baz Luhrmann's 1996 version of Romeo and Juliet this play counterpoints the language and atmosphere of Shakespeare with the modern setting, and yet it never feels incongruous. Maybe that just serves to remind us how universal and timeless are the stories that he tells.

Gale warnings at Home

Home 

There are lots of interesting (and also free) things going on at Home (formerly The Corner House) next weekend to celebrate their first birthday, but Monkey and I went today to see a production of Twelfth Night by Filter Theatre. A riotous gig is how the website describes it and it was certainly most loud, hilarious and unconventional Shakespeare. The audience were a little slow on the uptake of the players requests for participation, but once we got into the swing of it the party really took off. A bare stage that looked more like a rehearsal space containing only musical instruments lets you know right off they are not going for a conventional setting, and then we had some dialogue over a mobile phone and the arrival of Viola is accompanied by the BBC shipping forecast, interrupted by further dialogue over the radio. Sir Toby seemed a little confused as to which play he was meant to be in, spouting lines from Macbeth, Hamlet and Henry V, at one point sporting a donkey head hat, and wandering down the aisle saying 'a plague on these McVitie's Jaffa Cakes'. There was pizza and tequila shots and a conga line on the stage, followed by a cascade of small sponge balls. The physical comedy was so well rehearsed and put together and it came across as very spontaneous, and never interfered with the intrinsic humour of the tale. We were a little confused because several players were playing more than one part and it was not entirely obvious (to me anyway, Monkey was more familiar with the cues), but for people familiar with the plot (which I was not) I'm sure it was fine. Shakespeare plays are very self-consciously 'plays', often talking directly to the audience and telling you that they are telling a story. Just the other day I reread my review of Hard Times from five years ago and the immersive nature of that performance contrasted very sharply with this play, that continually reminded you that you were watching performance. They are ending their tour this week at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth.

A to Z Challenge Reflections

It all started with the puzzle of Convergence that Dunk bought for me, which led to this second puzzle, 'Battle of Lights, Coney Island' by Joseph Stella, (bought from Barney's Newsbox) which led to my decision to blog about art for my A to Z Challenge this year. After much coaxing and cajoling and nagging I also managed to persuade Dunk to join in too, and much to my surprise he stuck it out and I learned all sorts of new stuff about him.

April's Blogging from A to Z Challenge always manages to bring me back to the early days of blogging when I used to spend a lot of time browsing other people's blogs, so I tend to use my reflections post to point people to a few new places that I have been visiting. 

Chicaderock blogged about life in Galicia in rural Spain, a real window on another world.

Edward Kowalski blogs at Rants Unto The Ether, does exactly what it says on the tin.

Daryl blogs at Fairwinds, and expounded the delights of owning goats.

Fantasy Writer Guy gave us a huge selection of film reviews, some excellent recommendations.

I always love the crafty bloggers, and my new find this year was Maggie C at Glass Manifestations, who does the most beautiful stained glass.

Sarah at Deeply Trivial was not trivial at all, a very informative A to Z on the subject of social psychology.

Tilting At Windmills is the home of Amy who is another inspiring homesteader.

Lynne writes about various stuff over at Lynnelives, though her A to Z was delightful little watercolours of fruit and veg.

And finally, Robyn at 'Life by Chocolate' gave us the most surreal of A to Z themes, replacing Donald Trump's hair with various insane images, it made me smile every time.

Thanks to the organisers and all the participants, the A to Z Challenge always renews my enthusiasm for blogging.

Boneland: a true Story

It was only after I bought it home from the library that I realised that 'Boneland' by Alan Garner was the third part of the Weirdstone Trilogy, written, in the same way that Ursula LeGuin wrote two more books long after the original Earthsea trilogy, for the same readers who are now adults.

Colin is now a professor and works at the observatory at Jodrell Bank, but the events of his childhood still haunt him, especially the disappearance of his twin sister, hovering in the background of his damaged memory. With the help of Meg, a somewhat unorthodox psychiatrist, he delves into his past. I was suspicious of her all along, and as it turns out she is not everything she seems, but mostly they just hang out together, while she tries to get him to talk. Here they are taking a walk, with Colin, as so often, taking refuge in science:

"They are back among the trees. The scarp curved in a horseshoe. The path had been rerouted, but Colin took her down along an older one, with the wall on their left and the drop to their right.
'What the flipping heck is this?' said Meg
They were below the pointed wedge of the hill that jutted high above the path.
'Castle Rock,' said Colin. 'It's the most instructive part of the Edge. It shows the Permo-Triassic boundary clearly. Which is why it's so remarkable. Here, where we are, the polychromatic sandstone has eroded because it's a soft aeolian desert and the grains have lost their facets through being worked by the wind; hence all the graffiti. Then above, a slow estuarine feature has moved in, hard, with no inclusions. And above it is the conglomerate, without stratification but full of derived quartz pebbles, indicating high-energy flow, a torrential fluvial deposit.' " (p.69-70)

Alongside is a much older story of a Watcher, part of the mythology that surrounds the place. He has an important role to play and fears what will happen if he cannot make a child to replace him:

"It hurt to turn the stick between his palms to blow a fire heap. It hurt to follow his shoulder and to twist his head through the hill along the seam of grit. It hurt to cut the veil to set the spirits free. His hand on the blade lost its grace, and it hurt to make a beast true. Yet if he did nor make it true the spirit would not be true. Beasts would go into the world unmade. Wolves would feed until there were no more, and then wolves and all would pass because they had eaten life rough-hewn. The Stone Spirit and the Bull would see that the land was wrong and dead, and there would be no eagles sent to feed the stars; the sun would not turn from death, and there would be only wanderers and the moon and Crane flying at night.
There had to be a woman that he could hold, to grow a child that he could teach, to stop the dark. But where she was he could not dream." (p.58-9)

I feel like you could not come to this book cold, you need to know the back story. I read 'The Weirdstone of Brisingamen' to the children many, many years ago and it left a vague memory of the children and a necklace and some sleeping men, and a terrible fear of the narrow tunnel that the characters are forced to crawl though to escape some threat; it is not often that a book provokes such a strong reaction from me and thinking about it still makes my blood run cold. But I do not remember it well enough for this one to make much sense. Boneland is all atmosphere, very much about the place the Alan Garner lives and writes, but it is also very much an adult book, there is no adventure or quest, there is only Colin struggling to understand what happened and if there is something left that he should do. A strange book.

Turkish Coat Part 2

I have had a busy month, what with the A to Z Challenge and the local elections coming up and helping Ben with his campaign, and then there was the Readathon that took up the entire of last weekend, but I have still managed to make quite considerable progress with my Turkish Coat project.

We paid another visit to Leons and bought five metres of cotton batting, that was allowing for pre-washing and the potential shrinkage.

Then the four metres of yellow linen arrived. This has come from a website simple titled 'Dress Fabrics' based in Ireland, which seems an appropriate place to buy linen. They sent me a small sample beforehand and the colour was exactly what I was looking for. (Just to give a mention to the lovely people at 'Ralston Fabrics' on Etsy, who also kindly sent a sample but the colour was too dark.)

Having dithered, as I mentioned last time, for a long time over the colour choice for this project I chose this yellow because of my beautiful cable jumper that I knitted back in 2012 but spoiled by shrinking very slightly.

I reread the instruction, which appear at first glance to be rather scanty, and finally grasped that the coat is not put together anything like I imagined. Each piece is to be layered and quilted together before being constructed.

All the batting pieces were cut out last week and today I have sewn some more of the patchwork fabric and cut out the sleeves. Here they are in all their layered glory:

I am planning to do a trial run of some quilting, so that is my aim over the next week.