Quotation of the day

“[Auntie Jean’s] flat, although still in a state of disarray, actually looked considerably tidier than it had before the forensic team began to search it.”

This is from Freefall, third in the “Tunnels” series of books – aimed at a teenage audience, but a good adult read nevertheless – which I am gradually reading and will review together when I'm done.

Aunie Jean is a deliberately cartoonish character, half slattern and half goodhearted salt of the earth, but the above quoted sentence made me laugh out loud.

This illustrates one of the advantages of eReading, since I allowed myself to be seduced into it: I read mostly on a 120mm tablet (since I only eRead when on the move), never on a PC which is impossibly clunky ... but I can mark a section (like the one above) when I see it, on the spur of the moment, then instantly call it up, copy and paste it, later when (as I am now) at a “proper” keyboard. A researcher's dream.

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• Brian Williams & Roderick Gordon, Freefall. 2009, Frome: Chicken House. 9781906427054 (pbk).
  Also 2012, London: Scholastic, (Kindle edition, location 908-909)
  

Enigma

“The two men disliked each other but only one of them knew this and he was the one to whom it didn't matter.”

(P D James, An unsuitable job for a woman. 1972, London: Faber and Faber.)

A bestiary (Bush Falls)

When I bought a second hand paperback copy of Jonathon Tropper's Bush Falls for fifty cents from a charity shop, it was only to make up a round sum of money with my other choices when I took them to the counter. I thought that I was getting a light, forgettable, humorous read. What actually got was a fine, wonderfully written piece of literature which I enthusiastically recommend to anyone ... but I did get the humour, which pervades the book.

Practically every page has at least one line which I itch to quote ... but this one, echoing as it does my recent A bestiary (2) post, is the one I've chosen.

The narrator, Joe, after nearly two decades of alienation, wants a rapprochement with his family. In this scene he has accepted an invitation to dinner with his estranged elder brother, sister in law Cindy, and their children. The children have a cockatoo, called Shnookums, which they are teaching to talk. We join them in the middle of a fraught conversation...

“Before I can ask him what he means, Shnookums comes flying into the dining room and performs a reckless dive into the chicken marinara, splattering the red sauce across the tablecloth as she flaps her wings in a frantic effort to correct her flight path. [... ... ...] The bird spins around on the serving platter as if it's standing on a lazy Suzan, unable to take to the air again because of the saturation of sauce in its feathers. Cindy swats at the bird, missing completely but knocking over her wineglass, which spills onto the table, and the wine bottle, which hits the wood floor with a resounding thud. "Goddammit!" Cindy shrieks. We all watch, mesmerized, as Shnookums finally extracts herself from the chicken dish and takes a few jerky steps across the table, leaving perfect red footprints on the tablecloth in her wake before coming to a stop directly in front of me. "Hey, dickhead," she says, and that pretty much wraps up dinner with the family.”

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• Jonathon Tropper, Bush Falls. 2005, London: Arrow. 0099461234 (pbk.)

Quotation of the day

“I think one does best, in life as well as in art, to focus on one’s own likes and loves, enjoying the pursuit of idiosyncratic experimentation. My own new goal is to live as much as I can in the work I do when I’m in love with what I’m doing for its own sake.”

Well said, Christopher Volpe.

Not quoting but clowning

I've had a spatter of queries about the title of yesterday's post, "Not trawling but drowning", most of them suspecting that it's a quotation they ought to know.

It's not a quotation (or not so far as I know, anyway; one can never be sure) but a subversion of one: I twisted it from the title of Stevie Smith's most widely known poem.

Not waving but drowning
(Stevie Smith, 1953)

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Act of god

The dean of Christchurch Cathedral, New Zealand, this morning, made an observation which reminds me of the views expressed, from time to time, in Jim Putnam's former TTMF blog.

“The earthquake is not an act of God; it's the planet, doing what the planet does. The act of God is the response of people to the results of the earthquake.”

As a nonbeliever, it's probably arrogant of me to express an opinion about believer's views of the world ... but that is one which I can, even from my very different viewpoint, understand, accept, and admire.

He was commenting in the context of plans for a new cardboard cathedral, designed by Shigeru Ban to replace the one demolished by earthquake in February of this year.

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• Sunday, BBC Radio 4. Sunday 2nd October 2011.

Quote, unquote

Today I sat in an audience and heard a speaker say, amongst many other things over a period of forty minutes, the following:

“Socialisation is a process which delivers benefits to all, even the least fortunate, which nobody in their right mind (least of all I) would give up. Unfortunately, part of the price for those benefits is to convert a significant proportion of a predominantly bright, intelligent, curious population of five year olds into dull, prefrontally lobotomised eighteen year olds. For some, too few, education serves to slow down, arrest, reverse or even prevent that conversion process. For a greater proportion, education is part of that process. For others, possibly the largest (and maybe the saddest) proportion, it has no obvious effect in either direction. We badly need to seek ways of increasing the size of the first group at the expense of the other two.”

The speaker was, ten years ago, a fourteen year old education system reject from a "sink estate", whom I met in an urban outreach scheme made possible by an enlightened and far sighted café owner. Today he is a graduate with a first class honours degree in hand, not much money in the bank, but five years of passionate dedication under his belt to helping a new generation of education system rejects to reconnect with their "bright, intelligent, curious" five year old selves.

Some people make me proud to be human; the speaker, and the café owner who was also in the audience, are two examples.

Photograph: memento mori

“All those photographs broke Jackson's heart. Holiday snaps, birthdays, and Christmases, all the highlights of family life. Jackson found photographs unsettling enough at the best of times. There was a lie at the heart of the camera, it implied that the past was tangible when the very opposite was true.”

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• Kate Atkinson, Started early, took my dog. 2010, London: Doubleday. 9780385616997 (tpbk). ["Arcadia", §10:4e, p.261]

Quote, unquote

Re-reading Michael Frayn's Fleet Street novel Towards the end of the morning (or, if you are in the Americas, Against entropy). As with any Frayn, it's full of more quotable lines and passages, many of them laugh out loud candidates, than I could shake a stick at (strange expression ... why would I want to shake a stick at them?), but here's one...

“...they all had an air of unassuming integrity and human dignity which in [his] experience was acquired only by daily contact with very large sums of other people's money.”

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• Michael Frayn, Towards the end of the morning. 1967: London: Collins. [more recent republication: 2005, London: Faber and Faber. 0571225578 (pbk.)]

I, the sculptor, am the landscape

From Barbara Hepworth's autobiography:

“All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures.

Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form.

Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fulnesses and concavities, through hollows and over peaks feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. The sensation has never left me.

I, the sculptor, am the landscape.”

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• Barbara Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth : a pictorial autobiography (ed: Anthony Adams). 1978, Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker Press. 0239001796. [Republished 1985, London: Tate Gallery. 0946590338]

Two quotations

Two quotations which, while they do not fully describe photography or replace other views, do represent a truth not often enough emphasised. Both taken from a photography course graduation show.

“Photography is freedom, photography is a play day!” (Stacy Robson)

“Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.” (Arnold Abner Newman, quoted by Kathryn Gatt)

Mad dogs and absent friends

An Isra'eli friend writes, gloomily:

“After living my whole life in a country which bases its foreign policy on mad dog principles, I should really be inured to surprise over anything it does. The whole point of a mad dog strategy is that one is unpredictable, that nothing is impossible, that no response is in principle too extreme or disproportionate, that the slightest perceived provocation may produce an insanely inappropriate reaction, that everyone around is always too jittery to organise a threat.

And yet, the habit and instinct of rationality die hard in me. I see my country indulge in an act of piracy on the high seas and I am wearily unsurprised; but to see it doing so against its only regional ally and (more significant still) its only Moslem ally, still has the power to make me shake my head in despair.

I don't like or approve the mad dog policy, though I understand where it came from. I don't like Turkey, much, either, though I understand that governments find their friends where they can. Now I see that when the two things come into conflict, the mad dog wins.

What haunts me now is the knowledge that there can, by definition, be no limit to what a mad dog will do. I have always clung to the rational belief that while owning nuclear weapons was an obvious enhancement of the mad dog image, actual use would make them valueless. Now, I am no longer sure that my rational belief is shared by those who will make the decision.”

Memories were...

Memories were just photos printed on synapses. As such, he justified sharing some of them with the world while keeping others locked in private albums.”

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• Ali Shaw, The girl with glass feet, ch 8. 2009, London: Atlantic Books. 9781843549208