a gallimaufry

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Venice, Tokyo and London by Lauren Elkin

Shiny New Books 12 is out today (have there really been 12 issues?), always a cause for celebration, and I have written a review for it. Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Venice, Tokyo and London was just as good as I’d hoped (I’ve been awaiting its publication impatiently). If Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, Sophie Calle, revolution and loitering interest you, then you know where the nearest library or bookshop is...

Meanwhile, I’m settling down to read the rest of Shiny and bankrupt myself.

photographs of Bichonnade, by Jacques Henri Lartigue

Earlier this week, I spent quite a long time looking for some photographs of Paris around 1919. This was harder than I expected, since many photographs aren't very accurately attributed. And my internet connexion is dreadful these days. I did find useful site called Only Old Photographs, which has lots of pictures, not just of Paris. And there I found the picture below.

It didn't really suit the Mirrlees poem, but it is so wonderful and odd I had to re-post it here. It reminds me of an Yves Klein poster I have hanging on the wall, Le Vide, Paris (1960); I suppose I like pictures of people leaping into space.

(Jacques Henri Lartigue, Ma cousine Bichonnade, Paris, 40, Rue Cortambert, 1905; found here)

Looking for more information about Lartigue, I discovered that another version existed. I like it too.

(Jacques Henri Lartigue, Bichonnade Leaping, undated but presumably 1905, found here. More information on Lartigue here.)

some things I didn't know about e-books, and which you might not know either

(Library, diorama made and photographed by Lori Nix, 2007, from her series ‘The City’; from her website)

While I do not own an e-reader and don’t see myself purchasing one in the near future, I am not an adherent to the ‘Apocalypse rides on the coat-tails of e-books’ school of philosophy any more than I believe that anyone who persists in buying paperbacks is naught but a puppet to the dark forces of ‘legacy’ publishing and a Luddite impeding the free flow of great literature. I am bored with all the heated quarrels pitting paper against electronics and the wild predictions, and I have given up reading most articles with anything about e-books in the title. However, I have recently come across two pieces I found interesting on this very subject.

One, from the BBC, describes a reading revolution which is occurring in Africa. Hitherto, poor infrastructure has made distribution of books very difficult (and that is just one of the many headaches publishers in Africa have faced). In many areas away from larger towns and cities, readers and also aspiring writers have been left stranded, unable to access books. But in the wake of the astounding adoption of mobile phones across the whole continent over the past decade, smartphones are becoming increasingly popular. With them has opened up the possibility of downloading and reading books – any books! Books written in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Britain, France, the US; books translated from the Chinese, Latvian and Finnish. Books full of stories, ideas, challenges. Until global poverty has been properly addressed, millions of Africans will not have the means to afford a smartphone nor the access to electricity with which to charge it, but for many of the better-off this is hugely exciting and full of implications for the future.

The other article, in the Guardian, concerned some research which suggested that readers of a text on Kindles recalled less of the plot than readers of the same text on paper. The research only involved 50 readers, and of the Kindle readers only two were ‘experienced’ Kindle readers, so I think it needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt, but in conjunction with another small study of Norwegian students, also referenced in the article, it starts to raise questions about the limitations of electronic devices for certain sorts of reading. What do you think? Have any of you had experiences which fit with this? I used to copy-edit and proofread and I must say I didn’t work as well on-screen as on paper – but then I assumed that was because I was a dullard. Maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t...

(Some new friends)

Of mice and enthusiasms

(Beatrix Potter, ‘Presently there was a little scuffling, scratching noise in a corner near the fire-place’, from A Tale of Two Bad Mice, 1904; available here)

The guests chez gallimaufry now include a bold black mouse, who emerged from a heap of paper in the corner of the cupboard-like room I pretentiously refer to as a study to dance about our house all last evening. I thought mice were supposed to be shy! This one has no qualms and even scampered across the bed while my daughter (E) and I were playing on it. Despite the mouse’s compulsive exhibitionism, my partner did not spot it for ages – little E did keep shouting ‘Rat! Rat!’* but as she sees imaginary peacocks and dogs running about the house all the time K paid no attention to this. At last the mouse went too far and sat in front of the television while K was watching it. I would quite happily share the house with a mouse or two, yes yes, I know I am a slattern, mice steal your cake and poo on your rugs and Beatrix Potter has much to answer for, but I can’t help thinking it’s all about context. If we caught the mouse and put it in a cage it would be a pet and acceptable (except to my mother), if probably unhappy. Yet wild and free it is a pest. For now, K and I have compromised on a humane trap and mouse rehoming a cycle ride away.

Samuel Beckett made a film! Perhaps you knew that? I didn’t. It’s called Film. You can watch it at Brain Pickings. (Via Lauren Elkin.) It’s ... Becketty, and fascinating.

‘I’m [...] intrigued by the thought of new ways to write about books, and I wonder what the book blogging world will come up with next?’ Thoughtful post and discussion at Tales from the Reading Room on why we post and read book reviews (or not). Join in!

Further to my previous post, Elio Di Rupo is back! And yesterday, after Standard and Poor reduced Belgium’s credit rating and the rate of interest on the country’s borrowing rose further, the acting prime minister Yves Leterme demanded that Di Rupo and the parties involved produce a 2012 budget before markets re-open on Monday. They pulled an all-nighter and have done so! Whether this will improve Belgium’s interest rate, and what the long-term impact on the euro may be, remain to be seen. Next step: a government.

‘Doubt is very much a feature of my working day, and an essential one at that’: the translator Margaret Jull Costa talks about her work, language and reading at The White Review.

A combination of beautiful cover and the review at Desperate Reader engendered book lust in me – so I bought a copy of Enthusiasms for my mother for Christmas and am now shamelessly – if carefully so as not to mark it – reading it myself. I’m altruistic like that. Has anyone else ever done this? Enthusiasms is a most enjoyable read; it’s a series of essays on literary subjects that intrigued Girouard when he was having time off from being a brilliant architectural historian (his work is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the English country house). The essays are usually inspired by a need to correct an inaccuracy or a false myth. So far, I have discovered that Jane Austen failed to finish a novel called Catherine which may lay claim to being her first ‘properly Austenish’ work; that there was an anonymous Victorian author named ‘Walter’ who kindly chronicled his sexual exploits with over a thousand women; and that John Masefield, whose most famous poems are the romantic ‘Cargoes’ and ‘Sea Fever’,  hated the sea. Like being told wonderful anecdotes by a very clever and entertaining uncle, reading this is the thing for an idle November afternoon.

* We have rats in our ceiling but probably best not to dwell on that.