The Blog Post to End All Blog Posts Part 3: Wishes

I can’t be certain that I won’t pick this blog up again one day, but for now I will echo the sentiments of the wonderful Mr. G (who, like me, gets nostalgic when the year changes):

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

The Blog Post to End All Blog Posts Part 2: Christmas ramblings

This year as Christmas approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about the shade side of the Season. There’s a lot that I’m leaving behind at the end of this year, and a lot that I’m looking forward to in the new year, and I guess this has made me reflective. All of the media messages regarding Christmas amount to the same thing: it’s the most wonderful time of the year/you’ll have a fantastic time with your family/it brings us all together. But what if it doesn’t?


Christmas, if you push aside the commercialism and frantic rush for presents, is a time of year that keeps us honest. It can be a time for sharing and love and warmth, but the shade side is this: if you’re lonely, you feel your loneliness at Christmas; if you have trouble getting on with your family, you have to face the tension at Christmas; if you’re scared or doubtful or apprehensive about the future, the time of ‘celebration’ draws out the fear and doubt and apprehension.

I’ve been exploring these thoughts through various media. Here’s what I’ve been tuned in to:

Music: Kate Miller-Heidke’s ‘The Day After Christmas’. (I saw her live last year and she said something to the effect of: “This is a song about a time of year when you’re supposed to be happy, but if you’re not then everything sucks so much more.”)

TV: West Wing’s Christmas episodes (one from each Season). The Christmas episodes of West Wing are always poignant, exploring familial difficulties and personal setbacks.

Movie: Love Actually. I don’t think that requires explanation.

So what does this have to do with books? Only this: I haven’t yet found a book to read which explores the shade side of Christmas. The only one which springs to mind is A Christmas Carol, but Dickens and I have tried getting on before and we have Artistic Differences. So I’m putting the question out there: can anybody think of a shade-side-of-Christmas book for me to read?

The Blog Post to End All Blog Posts Part 1: Wrapping up

I learned last week that I’ve been awarded a scholarship do my Masters, beginning in January. This is wonderful news, primarily because it means philosophy will be my full-time occupation. It does mean, however, that books won’t play as large a role in my life anymore. I’ll still be an avid reader, but I won’t be a literature student and I won’t be working at the bookshop very much. I’ve decided that means it’s time to stop keeping this wonderful blog and to focus on other things.

Here’s a few parting bookish thoughts, in The Blog Post to End All Blog Posts, a Farewell in Three Parts.

Here’s some links and thoughts on some of my favourite subjects:

Neil – a wonderful interview of Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer can be found here to listen to free or download for a tiny tiny fee.

Jane – a friend recently convinced me to give Northanger Abbey another go. It’s the first Jane Austen I ever read and my least favourite. I’m beginning to realise that last time I read it (at fifteen), much of the wonderful metafiction was simply over my head.

Laura – adopt a critic. Read Laura Miller’s bookish thoughts over at Salon.

Re-re-reblog

I shan't write a proper blog post because the universe might just implode, but Naja reblogged about my reblogging about her reblogging about my blog about graphic novels, and you can read it (that is, the first one in that list) here.

Sometimes when Naja talks about literature, I feel like she's plucked the thoughts right out of my brain and articulated them in ways I couldn't possibly. This is one of those times.

Reblogging

This is how awesome thinking comes about. Collaboration.

The fascinating, wonderful Naja linked to my previous post about graphic novels via Tumblr. I met Naja in the course of my English degree. She kept cropping up in my classes, in those delicious English classes about children's lit and fairy tales which felt like cheating because it wasn't work to study these things, not really, it was fun.

Anyway, here's something Naja says in her blog about my blog which, by the way, you can read right here:

Novels are only just a majority in my favourites collection, and sometimes I feel like a bad lit student for it, because I have such a short attention span and I much prefer WHAM POW PICTURES! to some weird snooty elite.

It's certainly not the most interesting thing she has to say (you really should read the whole blog) but I'm quoting it here because I relate to it. I have very little patience for long books, for wordy books, for overly literary books or for classics. I almost quit literature at uni after having to read Wuthering Heights in first semester, first year, but lucky for me I took a class on fantasy the following semester and fell back in love with books.

All this made me think about another blog I recently read, incidentally by Doc-in-Boots, the academic who runs all those classes on children's lit and fairy tales which Naja and I attended.

Graphic novels and 'the gang'

If you watch Australian TV, you may have noticed that Jennifer Byrne is suddenly everywhere (just this week she was a guest on both The 7pm Project and Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation). Sometimes I watch her First Tuesday Book Club, sometimes I don't. When I do, I usually find myself annoyed by the invariably literary nature of the books deemed worthy of the First Tuesday treatment, but I suppose one must make concessions for the fact that the audience of the show probably consists mostly of 'literature' readers.

A couple of weeks ago the ABC ran a special on Graphic Novels, presented by Jennifer Byrne. Why, I ask you? Why Jennifer Byrne? The woman may read a lot for her job, but this scarcely qualifies her to make informed comments on graphic novels. Her lack of grounding in the medium showed (to me, anyway), and much of the show seemed devoted to determining whether graphic novels have (or deserve) literary legitimacy. Which is somewhat beside the point. The audience that enjoys graphic novels knows that something doesn't have to meet the narrow definition of 'literature' to be good, to be worth reading, to be insightful and enjoyable and thought-provoking.

There was one part of the show I enjoyed- the part where the fabulous Eddie Campbell told it like it is. This is from the transcript:

JENNIFER BYRNE: I mean, this is part of - Sophie isn't the only one - there is talk of, finally, a focus on graphic novels as a serious form. Is it true or is it just...

EDDIE CAMPBELL: That's just what I hear. I hear that we've finally been accepted by the culture at large but at the same time, we still get... If this was true, I would be invited here... I'd be invited on shows for being an interesting personality but we still get invited everywhere as a gang.

JENNIFER BYRNE: The gang of...?

EDDIE CAMPBELL: We'll do something different this week. Get me a gang of graphic novelists.

Of course, he was right. The smugness of the First Tuesday attitude shows in the fact that graphic novels aren't considered worthy texts for the book club, and need to be presented in a separate 'special'.

You can view the special or read the transcript here.

Home Love

I have been living in my new place for four months now, and I still absolutely love it. Last week, I put Megan Morton's Home Love on my coffee table (I rotate my coffee table books about once a week) and, upon flicking through, realised how much of my inspiration for decoration came from this book.

It's a beautiful book, full of decoration and furnishing ideas which are practical enough to actually use. Here are a few snapshots of ways I used Megan Morton's ideas:

A feature wall of handbags in my bedroom, pictures hung with the edges touching, and on-display shelving for the kitchen. Another idea I'll be sure to use next month is hanging Christmas baubles from a chandeleir. I just happen to have a chandeleir in the centre of my house, and I think it will look quite festive and lovely!

Of course, my place isn't quite as polished as any of the beautiful homes photographed in Home Love, but that's the beauty of it. The ideas translate, they can be used in ordinary homes.

View on fishpond:

The fading art of readership

Laura Miller writes here about why we should make less fuss about writers and more about readers. Readers, she says, are an endangered species. Here's a quote for good measure:

Yet while there's no shortage of good novels out there, there is a shortage of readers for these books. Even authors who achieve ... publication by a major house will, for the most part, soon learn this dispiriting truth: Hardly anyone will read their books and next to no one will buy them.

On a somewhat related point, the Honours thesis I wrote this year had quite a bit to say about reading practices. In the course of my everyday conversations ("Hey Christina, how's the thesis going?" "Great! I'm looking at readership practices at the moment and [some unbelievably boring and complex philosophical aspect] is fascinating!") I was astonished to discover that most people take readership for granted. Reading is considered the most passive activity in the writing-editing-producing-reading process. It's just something that happens to people that sit down with a book.

Over the course of the year, I became a passionate supporter of the sophisticated reader. I don't mean that some people get lots out of a book because they have the knack for mining literature for little bits of gold. I mean that reading, any instance of reading, is an incredibly complex, sophisticated exercise in using one's imagination, interpreting language use, searching for cultural cues and negotiating author/reader authority.

Neil Gaiman in a Tardis - Esoteric much?

I couldn't resist sharing this, even though to properly get it you need to be a geek of four sorts: A Doctor Who geek, a Neil Gaiman geek, an internet geek and a philosophy geek.

Pretty clothes *sigh*

I love beautiful clothes, and I love beautiful books. So, naturally, I love beautiful books about beautiful clothes. I don't think I will ever quite understand why I adore clothing so much, but that doesn't stop me from trying. I think one of the reasons I read about style is because I'm attempting to understand why it's so important to me.

Two books I absolutely must have are released this week.

Dreaming of Chanel is a follow-on from Dreaming of Dior, which I blogged about here. It contains gorgeous fashion illustrations of vintage pieces. I could spend hours gawking at them.

A Life in Frocks, by Sydney Author Kelly Doust, is the most beautifully produced new release I have seen in years. The cover image below doesn't do it justice. Really. Every page is printed in two colours (black chapter text and red headers), with colour fashion illustrations scattered throughout (printed onto the page, not on separate plates). The paper has a beautiful texture. My favourite touch is that when you peek at the naked book beneath the dust jacket, you find colour illustrations of cute lingerie.

Kelly Doust writes:

Over the years clothes have comforted me, given me confidence, lured love interests, made me invisible, secured jobs, aged me and given back my youth. ... It's a testament to their immense power that clothes can be so many things.

If you know someone who loves clothes as much as I do, think about getting them one of these books for  Christmas.

View on fishpond: A Life in Frocks