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the_lady_lily) wrote2010-05-30 11:52 pm
the_lady_lily) wrote2010-05-30 11:52 pm
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The Life of Christina of Markyate
I read this whilst on retreat, which was a Good Idea - it provided some quiet brain-space to let some of the other stuff think in. However, even if you are not going on retreat, this is still a good book to read. Christina was a virgin who lived during the eleventh century, and her life is pretty amazing. She vowed to be a holy virgin when she was a child, but her family tried to force her into a political marriage; she actually ran away and hid in a tiny, tiny cell for about four years until her husband had a big scary visitation in a dream (there are lots of holy dreams in the Life) and released her from her marital obligations. She went on to head her own religious community and generally keep the local abbot in line by telling him off sternly whenever he needed it.
There are a couple of reasons this is worth reading. Firstly, it is low on the miracle count. You get visitations in dreams, some prognostication and a handful of visions, and a couple of healing miracles much later on in the narrative, but other than that, there's none of the being-decapitated-and-miraculously-returning-to-life business that you get in other religious biographies. This makes for a markedly more interesting and moving read. Secondly, the writer is remarkably candid about Christina's life. She has a prolonged battle with The Demon Lust, sent by the Devil to tempt her, which apparently involved a man overtaken by lust for her appearing to her naked and making demands so lewd the writer can't bring himself to record them to paper (which could be - well, pretty much anything, really, given that Christina was a holy virgin, so don't get too excited). As she is All Consecrated, Christina manages to control her desires even in the face of a keen naked man she fancies like anything, but simply the fact that a virgin wrestles with lust at all is pretty amazing in this sort of thing. You actually come away from this liking her, and that again is pretty unusual with this sort of work. She feels like a real person, who made hard decisions and struggled with her own internal battles, and not like an overpious prissy half-wit you'd quite happily heave a half-brick at.
Rapture – Carol Ann Duffy
I posted a poem from this a while back, and all I can say is that everyone should read this collection. It's short. It's brilliant. The language is full of grace and echo and genuine feeling. The emotions expressed are deep and varied. The collection describes the course of a relationship, from its initial beginnings to its crashing ending, and pretty much anyone who's ever been through the relationship cycle will get part of your heartstrings twisted at some point. (Me, I can't work out if the addressee is a man or a woman, but that's just me.) There are things there that speak to my experience of being on the other side of the world to G and to commuting relationships, as well as to my love of tea. But I'm not going to waste words on this. Again, it is a short book. It is marvellous. It won the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize for a reason. Go and spend some time with it. She is, after all, the Poet Laureate. You deserve to know why.
Service with a Smile - P G Wodehouse
I decided that reading this on the way back from the retreat was a good idea as it has sod-all to do with retreat-type subjects, and obviously as the next in the series of Blandings Castle books has a certain comfort zone associated with it now. After all, it's fairly easy to predict the main plot points - Lord Emsworth's prize pig, the Empress of Blandings, will at least risk being stolen; somebody will get engaged to somebody they shouldn't; somebody will come and visit Blandings under an assumed identity; Lord Emsworth's sister Connie will become enraged at her brother and probably everyone else in sight in a terribly British upper class way; Beach the butler will carry out his profession as professionals do; a young gal will be trying to marry an unsuitable young man (or possibly vice versa).
And, dear reader, all these plot elements do indeed appear in Service With A Smile. In this, they are greatly aided by the Fifth Earl of Ickenham, better known as Uncle Fred (he of Uncle Fred in the Springtime). It is quite a joy to see Uncle Fred back, for he is like a Lord Emsworth except with a cheerfully plotting innocent nature and the aim of putting the world to rights eventually. I have to say that part of me quite wants to be Uncle Fred when I grow up. It also feels as if Wodehouse has noticed he might be being a wee bit formulaic, and is thus happy to mix up elements a bit - the pig stealing, for instance, for the first time is plotted but discovered, and the people who get engaged to each other actually neither wish to be engaged to each other, that sort of thing.
But you don't read Wodehouse for the plot novelty. You read it for the comfort and the giggles, and both I had from this.
Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes A Day – Joan Bolker
I have very mixed feeling about this. It's one of the classics of the genre, the one that's recommended everywhere, but I'm not entirely taken with it. One reason for that is that the initial advice, on how to get oneself writing, is entirely at odds with my own experience of writing. Bolker believes in messy writing, in just generating stuff to keep your writing gears oiled, in churning out nonsense about your cat and your aches and pains and how much you wish the car alarm outside would stop, in the hope that eventually something about what you're actually supposed to be writing about will surface in your brain and gush onto paper. I... have never written like that in my life. I can see the benefit of the just-write-something school; after all, I have a tendency to use LJ a bit like that, in that I know that writing LJ entries is a good thing to keep my creative and autonomous writing brain oiled when my current work is reading and transcribing notes. But I'm a much tidier writer than Bolker; I get a first draft together in my head and in outline, and then I sit down and write through it, and then I go back and fiddle a bit, and then I get it to other people for their feedback. Revisions, alright, she's better on revisions for me. But her method seems aimed at people who were raised on the dreaded American Five Paragraph Essay, which never formed part of my consciousness.
That's not to say this isn't worth perusing. It is a short book, and it is (as one would hope) well written. There are some good points here for people at every stage; I certainly found that as I moved past the early sections that deal with how you get your writing started, more and more of what she had to say made sense. Particularly enlightening was her observation that some people get stuck with their theses because they don't want to finish - they can see the grief process coming as they wrap up something that's been such a big part of their lives for however many years, and they'll do anything they can to self-sabotage and stop that loss occuring. Actually, it made a lot more sense of the kind of feelings I've been having now that I'm reaching the stage of mainly revising my thesis material rather than generating new raw content, and I am very grateful for that insight. But Bolker herself says it in her introduction - read the book with a pinch of salt, knowing that everyone's writing process is different, and take what is useful for you. Don't try and fit yourself to a pattern; get into the habit of learning what makes you tick and gets you writing. She offers some hints and tricks, which for me weren't much good, but who knows? Somebody reading this might get far more out of it than I did.
I read this whilst on retreat, which was a Good Idea - it provided some quiet brain-space to let some of the other stuff think in. However, even if you are not going on retreat, this is still a good book to read. Christina was a virgin who lived during the eleventh century, and her life is pretty amazing. She vowed to be a holy virgin when she was a child, but her family tried to force her into a political marriage; she actually ran away and hid in a tiny, tiny cell for about four years until her husband had a big scary visitation in a dream (there are lots of holy dreams in the Life) and released her from her marital obligations. She went on to head her own religious community and generally keep the local abbot in line by telling him off sternly whenever he needed it.
There are a couple of reasons this is worth reading. Firstly, it is low on the miracle count. You get visitations in dreams, some prognostication and a handful of visions, and a couple of healing miracles much later on in the narrative, but other than that, there's none of the being-decapitated-and-miraculously-returning-to-life business that you get in other religious biographies. This makes for a markedly more interesting and moving read. Secondly, the writer is remarkably candid about Christina's life. She has a prolonged battle with The Demon Lust, sent by the Devil to tempt her, which apparently involved a man overtaken by lust for her appearing to her naked and making demands so lewd the writer can't bring himself to record them to paper (which could be - well, pretty much anything, really, given that Christina was a holy virgin, so don't get too excited). As she is All Consecrated, Christina manages to control her desires even in the face of a keen naked man she fancies like anything, but simply the fact that a virgin wrestles with lust at all is pretty amazing in this sort of thing. You actually come away from this liking her, and that again is pretty unusual with this sort of work. She feels like a real person, who made hard decisions and struggled with her own internal battles, and not like an overpious prissy half-wit you'd quite happily heave a half-brick at.
Rapture – Carol Ann Duffy
I posted a poem from this a while back, and all I can say is that everyone should read this collection. It's short. It's brilliant. The language is full of grace and echo and genuine feeling. The emotions expressed are deep and varied. The collection describes the course of a relationship, from its initial beginnings to its crashing ending, and pretty much anyone who's ever been through the relationship cycle will get part of your heartstrings twisted at some point. (Me, I can't work out if the addressee is a man or a woman, but that's just me.) There are things there that speak to my experience of being on the other side of the world to G and to commuting relationships, as well as to my love of tea. But I'm not going to waste words on this. Again, it is a short book. It is marvellous. It won the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize for a reason. Go and spend some time with it. She is, after all, the Poet Laureate. You deserve to know why.
Service with a Smile - P G Wodehouse
I decided that reading this on the way back from the retreat was a good idea as it has sod-all to do with retreat-type subjects, and obviously as the next in the series of Blandings Castle books has a certain comfort zone associated with it now. After all, it's fairly easy to predict the main plot points - Lord Emsworth's prize pig, the Empress of Blandings, will at least risk being stolen; somebody will get engaged to somebody they shouldn't; somebody will come and visit Blandings under an assumed identity; Lord Emsworth's sister Connie will become enraged at her brother and probably everyone else in sight in a terribly British upper class way; Beach the butler will carry out his profession as professionals do; a young gal will be trying to marry an unsuitable young man (or possibly vice versa).
And, dear reader, all these plot elements do indeed appear in Service With A Smile. In this, they are greatly aided by the Fifth Earl of Ickenham, better known as Uncle Fred (he of Uncle Fred in the Springtime). It is quite a joy to see Uncle Fred back, for he is like a Lord Emsworth except with a cheerfully plotting innocent nature and the aim of putting the world to rights eventually. I have to say that part of me quite wants to be Uncle Fred when I grow up. It also feels as if Wodehouse has noticed he might be being a wee bit formulaic, and is thus happy to mix up elements a bit - the pig stealing, for instance, for the first time is plotted but discovered, and the people who get engaged to each other actually neither wish to be engaged to each other, that sort of thing.
But you don't read Wodehouse for the plot novelty. You read it for the comfort and the giggles, and both I had from this.
Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes A Day – Joan Bolker
I have very mixed feeling about this. It's one of the classics of the genre, the one that's recommended everywhere, but I'm not entirely taken with it. One reason for that is that the initial advice, on how to get oneself writing, is entirely at odds with my own experience of writing. Bolker believes in messy writing, in just generating stuff to keep your writing gears oiled, in churning out nonsense about your cat and your aches and pains and how much you wish the car alarm outside would stop, in the hope that eventually something about what you're actually supposed to be writing about will surface in your brain and gush onto paper. I... have never written like that in my life. I can see the benefit of the just-write-something school; after all, I have a tendency to use LJ a bit like that, in that I know that writing LJ entries is a good thing to keep my creative and autonomous writing brain oiled when my current work is reading and transcribing notes. But I'm a much tidier writer than Bolker; I get a first draft together in my head and in outline, and then I sit down and write through it, and then I go back and fiddle a bit, and then I get it to other people for their feedback. Revisions, alright, she's better on revisions for me. But her method seems aimed at people who were raised on the dreaded American Five Paragraph Essay, which never formed part of my consciousness.
That's not to say this isn't worth perusing. It is a short book, and it is (as one would hope) well written. There are some good points here for people at every stage; I certainly found that as I moved past the early sections that deal with how you get your writing started, more and more of what she had to say made sense. Particularly enlightening was her observation that some people get stuck with their theses because they don't want to finish - they can see the grief process coming as they wrap up something that's been such a big part of their lives for however many years, and they'll do anything they can to self-sabotage and stop that loss occuring. Actually, it made a lot more sense of the kind of feelings I've been having now that I'm reaching the stage of mainly revising my thesis material rather than generating new raw content, and I am very grateful for that insight. But Bolker herself says it in her introduction - read the book with a pinch of salt, knowing that everyone's writing process is different, and take what is useful for you. Don't try and fit yourself to a pattern; get into the habit of learning what makes you tick and gets you writing. She offers some hints and tricks, which for me weren't much good, but who knows? Somebody reading this might get far more out of it than I did.