Currently Listening To: Bach's Italian Concerto


Currently Reading:  I have embarked on yet another delicious reread of A.S. Byatt's Possession.  It seems to me that no other author currently writing can engage both the imagination and the intellect in just the same way, with the same power, as Byatt.  I'm in the midst of those glorious, breathless letters between Christabel LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash and marvelling once again at Byatt's ease of description, emotional observation, and seemingly effortless (though it can't be, of course) characterization.  How Ash and LaMotte live in my imagination! Each time I open the novel and sip a few lines, the characters leap to life once more.


In terms of non-fiction reading, I've been making my way through Northrup Frye's The Great Code which is also fascinating, erudite, engaging.  I feel like I'm in the midst of a great intellectual feast.


Reading these two authors, having all this papery access to fascinating thoughts, makes one wonder why one bothers with the lesser?  Don't get me wrong, I don't mean the lighter, though reasonably good, writers who engage the mind but rarely tax it, because those writers are useful for a non-wasteful rest between the real challenging stuff of the mind.  But you know what I mean . . . the authors who pretend at art and end by offering up artifice. What a waste of precious reading time.


Recently Read:  After reading the very interesting new Humphreys novel (more on this when I've a chance to write up something akin to really worthwhile about it), I took a quick jaunt through one of her earlier novels, Afterimage. Definitely not a waste of precious reading time.  It inhabits like poetry -- quickly, deeply -- and in the aftermath the reader finds herself going back to trace just what's been done with a few short, bright, perfectly paced words. Aferimage imagines a 19th century female photographer (inspired by Julia Margaret Cameron), a thwarted male adventurer who happens to be her husband, and their maid who transforms and is transformed by their household.  Art, love, class, a microcosm of the intersection of these points in a life.


Recently Watched:  Another quasi-spooky film.  A 1945 mystery that seemed largely to have been ripped off of better stories (in the Du Maurier vein), My Name Is Julia Ross.  Not uninteresting, the story centres on a young, unemployed woman of no family who answers an ad for a secretary/companion and finds herself embroiled in a nasty cover-up.  The acting was good (especially Dame May Whitty), but the plot was lacking.