If writing is honey in terms of sweetness, then writing one's own language is ambrosia. If writing is sauce, then writing one's own language is the seasoning [salt]. If reading is work, then reading one's own language is its respite. (Translated [from N'ko] by Coleman Donaldson.)
"The idea of the shtetl was formed by Yiddish literature,' says Boris, "by writers like Peretz and Sholem Aleichem ... living in the big cities." Whether transmuted through a Chagall painting or a high school production of Fiddler on the Roof, the shtetl has come to stand in for the whole vanished world of traditional Jewish life Eastern Europe, shrunk down to the scale of a folklorized village....
With all her languages, Rasmina is almost an unofficial, unpaid interpreter [in Seke]...
"It's what a lot of immigrants go through," she says...
...these things add up. She draws the line when aunties, like aunties everywhere, try to follow their kids onto social media: "The social media is getting to them. They're very addicted now. Every day somebody's mom is like, 'Make me Instagram, make me TikTok,' and I say, 'No thank you!"
There was a great remembering that was also a great forgetting, one hundred years of silence ... of the convicts and Aboriginal people little was ever said. Of a slave system and a genocide nothing. What remained was either silence or lies. Such as: the convicts and their children had all fled to the mainland during the gold rushes. Such as: the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were extinct, long gone...
My father's mother and father...were... illiterate. My father had...a sense of the magic of words that never left him, an awareness that those twenty-six abstract symbols could liberate if you understood them and oppress if you didn't.
He told me the written word was the first beautiful thing he ever knew, a line I stole and used elsewhere. What is a writer but a robber and what is the history of literature but a milky way of theft?
I missed my big sister greatly and the point of the books was to smuggle a message of love to her, and each book, every faux sentence and every scrawled picture of a word was simply saying that one word over and over.
And so at the beginning I learnt this: the words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything.
When I think about this moment, I remember one of my favourite lines from The Simpsons, when Chief Wiggum catches his son Ralph and Bart trying to get into a locked cupboard in his attic: 'What is your fascination with my forbidden closet of mystery?' But if I was to tell you that mere curiosity is what drove me up the esplanade that day, it would be a lie...
The nurse who drew my blood....watches this infected blood flow for days on end, and despite her translucent gloves she passes right next to the source of this poison, she strips off her gloves with a snap to place the bandage on the wound with her bare fingers...
... she says, "Your perfume-it's Habit Rouge, isn't it? I recognized it right away....to catch a whiff of it on this gray morning, well, you know it's really a little treat for me."
Coordinating with my winter reading cardigan!
Excited about an upcoming #JamesBaldwin #100 event
[Robert, Count de Montesquiou] realized that German idea of making your life a work of art: a gesamtkunstwerk.
...he made his upstairs flat over-looking the Seine into 'the mirror of my soul', exotically furnished with japonisme and books. Many of us look around our dwelling and see...a series of shabby compromises, half-loved inherited junk, broken things, lingering IKEA tat ...and does anyone, hand-on-heart, have the curtains they really want?
And I am not resigned, as old Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of Honey's favorites, would say. Lily says to Gazala;
Grief is such a stalwart, sturdy companion, maybe it just wrings the neck of pettiness for us all. Gazala opens her eyes and lifts her head to look right at Lily, She nods.
Oh, leave the pettiness, she says, if you can.
Try.
Shiny new book for the Xmas wishlist!
D'Agoult...returned an hour and a half later....and announced that he had new orders specifying that he arrest councilors Duval d'Éprémesnil and Goislard de Montsabert. At that point, according to several accounts, all the magistrates replied with one voice, "We are all Duval and Goislard. It is all of us you must arrest."
France 1788 #ImSpartacus
.
"Don't pick up any wooden nickels."
Guessed what this meant, but had to look it up. Trying to think of a British equivalent.
/image from Wikipedia
This made me laugh, as I've heard it many times before.
#braai #notenglish
I really have no idea what's going on.
One of those books that should come with a link to the study notes...
so-soI'm pretty sure I've bought this from charity shops more than once, having loved (of course) Fingersmith and The Night Watch. This is an early one centred around the women in Millbank women's prison in the 19th century. Is one of the prisoners talking to the spirits?
A bit too miserable for a very wet week!
pickLoved this book, fascinating re-imagining of a real historical event, the abandoning of a young woman on an island off Canada during early French attempts at colonisation.
Apparently her house is for sale!
http://chateaudelamothe.fr/marguerite-de-la-rocque-16th-century-noblewoman-who-l...
We stood together, and I said, "I realize now-"
"What?" Auguste said.
"How easy my life has been."
Regretfully, Auguste said, "You have been rich, comfortable, and safe."
"No, I was never safe." My own words startled me, but they were true. If I was in danger here, so I had been at home. If I could not choose my dwelling place, that had been the case before. Following Auguste out. I thought. If we live in a cave, at least it will be ours only.
"Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey," said the linguist and polyglot Jakobson. In other words: it's possible to say anything in any language, but each language's grammar requires speakers to mark out certain parts of reality and not others, however unconsciously. This is the essence of what makes linguistics fascinating and revealing.
I never knew my mother. She died the night that I was born, and so we passed each other in the dark.
#FirstLine
Young reader, you won't live inside a rose.
That country has its planets, its rivers,
But it is as frail as the edge of the morning.
It's we who create it every day anew,
By respecting as real many more things
Than are frozen between a noun and its sound.
We wrest them into the world by force.
If got too easily, they don't exist at all.
So, farewell, things gone. Your echo calls us,
But we need to speak gracelessly and roughly.
...a Mexican, Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-95).... Her grandfather loved books, and in his house she taught herself to read and write Latin before she was five. Greek followed soon afterwards and as an adolescent she learned Aztec... she collected books and continued to educate herself....
Reading, she argued, should be a habit shared among women... 'we can perfectly well philosophize whilst cooking dinner'.
... the great Persian scholar al-Sahib ibn Abbad (d. 995). The Emir of Persia offered him the plum job of running the empire's most important province, Khorasan, but he declined on the grounds that it would take 400 camels to move his personal library.
...he encouraged the establishment of state libraries in Qom, Isfahan and Tehran, the latter containing 200,000 books.
The young man seemed ill at ease. 'Is there something wrong?'
Mm well... yes, in fact his library books.'
'What?'
"Well, he must have had two out, he always did....'
.....
Even a murder doesn't let him off those overdue fees??
Androids are taking over, everyone is tracked by devices they "choose" to wear and surrounded by adverts. I'm halfway through, and it's very creepy. Partly because it feels close enough to RL to be possible.
There had been some turnover among the Newbury Street Irregulars since we'd come west. Some of them had gone west as well... But computers kept getting faster, cheaper, and more interesting, and the Irregulars didn't lack for members....it was so crowded some nights that there was talk of closing off membership and starting a waiting list. The diehards hated this idea, because they had spent their whole lives being picked last for sports teams...
'It's okay,' she says. "There's no point talking about these things without honesty. About anything.'
He points out that quite a few of the pictures seem almost pornographic.
'That's true, she says.
She seems to think for a minute, and then she says, 'Most of the things here are either devotional objects, or more or less pornographic, or social trophies, or some combination of those things.
I can't decide if reading this with rugby in the background that I don't want to watch is a good fit with this title...
(I am today's find-the-streamer monitor, apparently. We're on #3 already... 🤔😱 )
The owner of the winery takes the people who work in the warehouse and the office to see them doing it - he says he wants them to be aware of what actually happens on the land. The day they go up there the workers are burning the pruned stems in piles on the grass at the sides. The white smoke rises into the air. The sun shines through the rising smoke. There's the scent of the smoke and the quiet crackle of the burning stems.
#Booker2025
They are lighting lamps there now at four o'clock, and with their high, narrow windows black against the sky, their sanded flags lit by pools of flaring gas-light, their cells dim, the women in them hunched, like goblins, over their sewing or their coir, the wards seem more terrible and more antique.
/Image via Museum of London
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/womenintranslation/longlist2025/
The judges said of the 2025 longlist:
“....the longlist... showcases the extraordinary range and depth of global women‘s writing now available to readers in English. The inclusive scope of this prize means that it crosses borders not just language and space but of time as well... Our longlist travels from Argentina to South Korea, from Haiti to Romania, from Sweden to Slovenia.”
In New York City, for example, only thirty-one enslaved people were manumitted during the entire eighteenth century..... more than eight thousand enslaved black people [were] living in the city during this time.
I love these chap books. So much temptation...
https://www.strangers.press/product-page/kanata-full-set
#Japan #InTranslation #StrangersPress
Every time the authors connect Jane's life to her fiction, they use much brighter, eye-catching colour. Here a visit to a stately home (might have) inspired Northanger Abbey.
Bio includes 🐣 from TV / movie adaptations too.
I got this one at least... (Colin Firth forever)
#Austen
#Pemberlittens
#10beforetheend
My back is not cooperating this weekend so painkillers, blanket and book it is.
pickSuch a fascinating glimpse into parliament, politics and what it was like to be an early woman MP c. 1930s
(The murder mystery is a bit ho hum).
"But, sir, I've often wondered why more people don't get murdered in this place when you think of the opportunities."
Photo: detail of a painting I took a long time ago visiting the H of P. Is that Gordon Brown?
The policeman on duty at the door....explained with a grin that the Home Secretary's League of Women Voters had arrived en masse to be shown round and given tea. The Minister had escaped after assuring them how glad he was to see them, how delighted Mr West would be to show them everything, and how terribly disappointed he was that a Cabinet meeting prevented him from having that great joy himself.
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pan