Category: books
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Click the image to learn more about the object – – “It’s easy for an ungrateful recipient to become unworthy of a gift, and conversely, a gift given without worthy intentions is one which can be rejected as worthless.” (p.…
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Derek Walcott is one of my favourite contemporary poets and “No Opera” is a relatively new poem by him, published in the February 2010 issue of The Believer and collected in White Egrets: No Opera No opera, no gilded columns, no wine-dark seats, no Penelope…
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Isobel Armstrong praises photography; and a certain person’s justification of her obsession with (her own) images. “The very fact that [the photograph] emerges from a fleeting moment in time means that that time is irrevocably lost. Even to exchange the…
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In One Day (2009), David Nicholls answers: “It would be inappropriate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging…
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“The Swing” (1767) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard Harold Bloom (1994) sums up Johan Huizinga’s summary of the properties of play: 1) freedom2) disinterestedness3) excludedness or limitedness4) orderJohan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1944), p. 13: Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity…
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“Oysters” by Edouard Manet, 1862 Shall the world, then, be overrun by oysters? What? Apart from this? Sarah Waters in Tipping the Velvet (1998) tells us more: I opened no more shells for Kitty, for she managed them herself. ‘Look…
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Drawing for The Exquisite Corpse by Victor Brauner, André Breton, Jacques Hérold and Yves Tanguy, 1935. HOW TO OPEN AT WILL THE WINDOW ONTO THE MOST BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPES IN THE WORLD AND ELSEWHERE With a large brush spread black gouache,…
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“Temptation”, from a German version of the Vita of Adam & Eve. Marina Warner in the article “Bananas” (1995) answers: In the seventeenth century, when savants were as keen on gardening as on the Bible, the general opinion of herbalists…
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Warning: the material below may disturb some. Angela Carter (1878 1978) in The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History answers: Many pornographic novels are written in the first person as if by a woman, or use a woman as the…
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– 0 The generous giver’s identity has been revealed. Thank you!
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– John Guillory in “It Must Be Abstract” has the following to say about ‘pleasures’: Complex pleasures may be mixtures of pleasure and pain, but complex pleasures are only preferable to simple ones when it is complex pleasures that we…
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In 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know (2010), John Sutherland uses Andrew Marvell’s poem “To his Coy Mistress” to illustrate the idea of ‘double bind’ (pp. 132-135). Had we but world enough timethis coyness, lady, were no crime. […] But…
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閱詩要配烈酒 –
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In the final paragraph of his London: The Biography (2001), Peter Ackroyd answers: [W]hen it is asked how London can be a triumphant city when it has so many poor, and so many homeless, it can only be suggested that…
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In a chapter about London’s sexy life (Chapter 41 “You sexy thing”), Peter Ackroyd relates some of Boswell’s sexual encounters. Boswell’s diary of street life in 1762 provides an account of sexual favours currently on offer. On the evening of…
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Peter Ackroyd in London: The Biography (2001) answers (see below). What is Hong Kong’s colour, I wonder? Red is London’s colour. The cabs of the early nineteenth century were red. The pillar boxes are red. The telephone boxes were, until…
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Cyril Wong’s single poem Satori Blues is available now from Books Actually and Select Books in Singapore, and Collected Works in Melbourne, Australia. More information at www.cyrilwong.org Cyril Wong’s poetry has been published in issue#1 of Cha. ==
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Colin Thubron’s Shadow of the Silk Road (2006) contains the following baffling passage: It has been said that the Chinese do not love. Observers of their family hierarchies have written that the only true tenderness exists between mother and son.…
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Last December, we went to see Alan Bennett’s new play, The Habit of Art, which is about an imaginary meeting between W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten (this is in a way similar to Adam Fould’s novel The Quickening Maze, which…
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Namesby Wendy Cope She was Eliza for a few weeksWhen she was a baby —Eliza Lily. Soon it changed to Lil. Later she was Miss Steward in the baker’s shopAnd then ‘my love’, ‘my darling’, Mother. Widowed at thirty, she…
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Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) answers: Of all the civilizations of premodern times, none appeared more advanced, none felt more superior, than that of China. Its considerable population, 100-130 million compared with Europe’s…
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According to Nicholas Ostler in The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (2010): The online communities that use languages other than English have grown meteorically in the first decade of the twenty-first century. From 2000 to 2009,…
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Nicholas Ostler answers in The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (2010): The decline of English, when it begins, will not seem of great moment.International English is a lingua franca, and by its nature, a lingua franca…
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Nicholas Ostler answers in The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (2010): Chinese, like all the great languages of the modern world excepting English and French, remains very much a localized language in eastern and southeastern Asia,…
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“How They Met Themselves” (1860-64) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti Umberto Eco once wrote, ‘Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us, because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.’ But where…
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