A couple of weeks ago I went to an academic conference in Bristol focused on the works of Diana Wynne Jones. She is probably best known for writing the book that the Studio Ghibli film Howl’s Moving Castle was based on, but she has around thirty other books aimed at a variety of ages. Even the ones aimed at children have a surprising amount of psychological and literary depth, and a willingness to explore very dark issues not usually found in books for that age group, giving her work a huge appeal to adults and academics.
Category: Books
Midsommar
Last night, I saw Midsommar, a film I’ve had my eye on for a while. It’s received very mixed reviews in the press, but I loved it. I felt it was pretty much what you’d get if you got Alexander Jodorowsky to direct the Wicker Man
Behemoth Lives!
Margate is currently hosting a variety of art events related to T.S.Eliot (who wrote the Wasteland here almost a century ago), including a weekend dedicated to cats over Easter. I created this print based on Bulgakov’s the Master and Margarita, and a giant painted banner version of it to hang up at the show. It was a bit last minute, but I got it all done on time. The show is on at the Viking Gallery off Northdown Rd over the long Easter weekend and until the 7th of April.
Knock Three Times
Knock Three Times is not a well-known book, which is a pity.
Sea Serpent Bookplates
I’ve made these printable bookplates, in both A4 and US Letter sizes. Four per page. They are for personal use only- you may not sell copies you have printed, host these files on another site, or use the artwork for any other commercial purpose.
The downloads are free, but if you like and use them, a pay-what-you-want tip is very much appreciated.
The District Without Qualities?
So I’m back in the UK. For good now. Most of this week has been taken up with house-hunting, arranging vans etc. More on that soon. I don’t like to count my chickens before they’re hatched.
However, I was tidying up the folders on my computer this week, and found these miscellaneous photos of Vienna from February.
Diana Wynne Jones zine
I have a zine of articles about children’s writer Diana Wynne Jones (of Howl’s Moving Castle et al) I wrote this zine in 2011, also managing to interview her before she sadly died (you can also read the interview online here). The original edition was 1/6 of an A3 sheet, made on a Risograph machine. This was great when I still had access to an A3 Riso machine, but after I didn’t it was very expensive and difficult to reprint, so it went out of print. Recently I did a new edition, with all-new illustrations, in a much more convenient standard A6 size
Miyazaki’s Reading List
When I was in Japan I went to the Studio Ghibli Museum just outside of Tokyo. Sadly pictures were not allowed inside, but I wrote about it in my zine of the trip. I highly recommend the museum, it’s magical. The bookshop was also stocked with Miyazaki’s own favourite books, as well as books related to the studio’s films. I didn’t buy anything, as they were all in Japanese, and it would take me forever to read anything, but I noted down a lot of less well-known books I saw in the shop to compile a reading list (helpfully the copyright tends to list the author’s names in roman text rather than try to make it fit katakana). Unfortunately I wasn’t able to write down the Japanese author’s names in most cases as reading unknown names written in kanji is very tricky. However Miyazaki made a list of classic children’s books (including a lot of the usual suspects like The Secret Garden) elsewhere which also includes some Japanese recommendations.
Polly’s reading list
Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones, based on the folk tale Tam Lin and Eliot’s Four Quartets, is one of my all-time favourite books. The gifts of classic books that the protagonist Polly receives from Tom, the other main character, are an important part of the plot, but not listed anywhere in the novel. I made this reading list of the books for the zine of essays about Diana Wynne Jones that I made.
This Means Nothing To Me
I have been in Austria for a week and a half now for teaching work. I meant to update last week, but some brutal 7.30 am start times, heavy snow, a lot of planning to do outside the classroom, and a diet of pure stodge in a small town with few dining options (and even fewer options for vegetarians) tired me out. It feels strange to be in small-town Austria, where not much tends to happen, while political turmoil with dire consequences for many vulnerable people goes on around the world.
Defeating the To Read pile
I’ve spent most of this afternoon sorting out my books, and making a pile of the unread ones. It turns out I have 84 unread books. Over the next six weeks it looks like I’m going to have a lot of time on my hands, unless a new job or a large chunk of money magically presents itself, so I’ll try to get through a good chunk of these.
Here is a list of the books, arranged alphabetically by author:
Charity shop finds
I haven’t found as many good charity shop items lately as over the summer, but there’s been the odd few things. I got this vase for £2, which I’ve planted an aloe vera in, for my own plant version of Sideshow Bob.
Godless heathenry
The next issue of Being Editors will be about C.S.Lewis and Phillip Pullman. As a sneak preview, and to give contributors an idea of what my own religious (or more to the point, non-religious) background is, here is the article I wrote which leads in to another about why That Hideous Strength is a guilty pleasure- if you’d like to contribute, find out more here
That Hideous Strength has always been a weird guilty pleasure. I’m not a Christian, never have been, and didn’t grow up in a religious environment. People enjoy the Narnia books because they’re good children’s books and written with charm and wit, and they don’t Jesus you too hard (except for the last one). That Hideous Strength is nothing like that, the plot is weirdly cobbled together, and it’s full of railing against every single one of C.S.Lewis’ personal bugbears as a sexist old Christian university don of the 1950s, and he doesn’t bother to hide it. The relentless sexism, homophobia and evangelising makes me want to throw the book against the wall as the godless hell-bound pinko lefty I am, but it’s just so gleefully bizarre that I actually quite enjoy it and have re-read it countless times.
Book reviews: the birds and the bees and T.H. White
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve arranged the book reviews in groups loosely on the same theme. Here’s the first set. More to come.
H is for Hawk Helen Macdonald
The Bees Laline Paull
The Sword in the Stone (The Once and Future King, #1) T.H White
The Witch in the Wood (The Once and Future King, #2) T.H White
The Ill-Made Knight (The Once and Future King, #3) T.H White
The Candle in the Wind (The Once and Future King, #4) T.H White
The Book of Merlyn (The Once and Future King, #5) T.H White
Danmark & Sverige
Tomorrow I’m going on holiday to Copenhagen for 5 days, somewhere I’ve never been before. I’ve visited Iceland, Finland and Estonia before, the outliers in the Nordic group of countries, and all in the winter, but I’ve never visited the core three Scandinavian countries in their famous long-dayed summers (although I’ve been in the Highlands of Scotland in the summer before, which is very similar). Copenhagen is within a short train ride of Malmö in Sweden (in fact Scania used to be in Denmark at one time), so I’ll kill two birds with one stone and visit Sweden too. As well as Copenhagen, I’m going to try to visit Roskilde, the Louisiana Art Museum and Elsinore, which are all nearby. (I’m not going to Legoland because it’s at the other end of the country, and I’ve been to the UK one loads for work anyway).
Penguin Little Black Classics
I bought some of these tiny 80th anniversary Penguin books the other day. Each book is around 50 pages long, and has short stories, poems or extracts from writers from around the world. The perfect size to keep in a bag for spare moment reading. There are 80 different ones to choose from, and each one costs a bargain 80p. In picking the books, I went for authors I had never heard of, or writers like Cavafy I’d heard of but never checked out. Hopefully I’ll discover something I really like. The full list of titles can be seen here.
Not gate-crashing a funeral
I actually attended this funeral/memorial for children’s writer Diana Wynne Jones over 2 years ago. I had meant to write about it for a long time, but I didn’t want to write anything without having the programme of speakers from the event to hand, and it stubbornly disappeared until recently when I had a big clear out of papers (and faded with some print rubbed off after 2 years), so here it is.
A baker’s dozen of books
1) Operation Mincemeat- Ben Macintyre
2) The Pyramid- Ismail Kadare
3) The Mirror Maker- Primo Levi
4) The Third Miss Symons- F.M. Mayor
5) The Making of the British Landscape- Francis Pryor
6) The Years of Rice and Salt- Kim Stanley Robinson
7) The Moving Toyshop- Edmund Crispin
8) Travels with a Typewriter- Michael Frayn
9) Mail Order Mysteries: Real Stuff from Old Comic Book Ads- Kirk Demarais
10) How to Build a Girl- Caitlin Moran
11) Fannie’s Last Supper- Chris Kimball
12) The Gallery of Regrettable Food- James Lileks
13) A Winter Book- Tove Jansson
Professor Knatschke
My university library had a massive stack of printing industry annuals from the 1890s through to the 20s. I always enjoyed looking through them because the illustrations and articles they chose to showcase new printing technologies were often really odd, and were good to photocopy for collages and zines. Next to them on the shelf was a strange little book called Professor Knatschke. It’s a comedy book written and illustrated in 1912 by Alsatian satirist Jean-Jacques Waltz, aka Hansi, about a clueless German professor and his daughter’s trip to Paris, mocking both the French and the Germans (but mostly the Germans) in a more innocent pre-WW1 pre-Nazi era. I always really liked the illustrations (and Elsa K’s obsession with making gifts embroidered with “inspiring” mottoes) , and now it’s available free online as a copyright-free ebook.
Books, books and more books
At one point I was writing brief reviews on here with my thoughts about various books I’d been reading. I’ve got out of the habit of doing that, and meant to get back in to it. I’ve been keeping track of my reading on Goodreads for years, but a listing and a star rating doesn’t feel like enough. I thought it would be too much to do the whole of this year’s reading, so here’s the last few months of books.
Bacchae prints for sale
I still have a couple of these 22×25 cm / 8.5×9.5″ risograph prints based on the Bacchae by Euripedes left.
The text says “ἔμαρψα τόνδ᾽ ἄνευ βρόχων λέοντος ἀγροτέρου νέον ἶνιν ὡς ὁρᾶν πάρα.” which means “I caught this young lion by myself, without a trap”. Pentheus’ mother, having run off into the woods with Dionysus to be a maenad, kills her son in a frenzy because she thinks he’s a lion, and then parades his head around the stage boasting about the lion she’s killed. That old plot cliché.
The Phantom Tollbooth
I recently watched this documentary about the Phantom Tollbooth, one of my favourite books when I was younger. (I still have the same battered, dog-eared paperback copy). Milo, the main character, is a boy who is always bored and doesn’t see the point in anything.
Fire & Hemlock risograph prints
Someone requested one of these risograph prints based on Fire & Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones (one of my all time favourite books) recently, but I thought I had run out. When I was re-organising some things thought recently it turned out I had 10 left after all. £10 + postage from the shop.
Literary Eating and Drinking in Prague
We didn’t have a long time in Prague, so we didn’t get to sample that many places, but the ones we did go to all seemed to be based on books. Fun, and a little strange. (And the beer in the Czech Republic is both very cheap and very good).
Golden Hands Book of Crafts
While I was at my grandparent’s place, I scanned some books. Here’s the Golden Hands Book of Crafts from the 70s. I have some of the magazine of the same name, which I scanned before. You can see that here. Most of the tutorials in the book weren’t very exciting, but there were some nice 70s stock pictures.
There’s More to Life Than Books You Know Pt I
So, long time, no see. I’ve been working very long hours at the day job, and I have also been without a computer. That should hopefully be sorted by next week though. Today I’m visiting my family, so I can add text-based things here, but no photos. There’s quite a backlog of photos running. I managed to break my phone, do something very painful to my shoulder and have my laptop spontaneously die in the space of 3 days. I’m a disaster zone for hire. If you want anything spoilt or broken in the near future, let me know, my rates are reasonable
Diana Wynne Jones Interview
A couple of years ago I interviewed the children’s writer Diana Wynne Jones, my favourite writer growing up. I was compiling a zine of articles about her work. Unfortunately I didn’t finish the zine before she died of cancer, because I’m a terrible procrastinator, and she never got to see it. When I get a chance, I have another entry to add about attending her funeral.
February books and films
Not a great deal to report here, I haven’t read that much or seen many films because I’ve been busy doing unfun things. Less of that, please.
Books:
1) Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong- James W Loewen
Songs based on books- a playlist.
Here’s a short playlist I made of songs based on (good, enjoyable) books, with some short descriptions for people who haven’t read the books in question.
70s interior design book
Here are some scans from a 1970s interior design book- House by Terrence Conran. Some of the stuff in it is really really 70s looking, and some is very clean and timeless-looking. The pictures I’ve scanned are a mix of the two categories. I just scanned the pictures that appealed to me, as it’s a massive book. Some of them are a little grainy due to the printing technique. I scanned another 70s interior book I have here.