Category: t
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Quote of the day – Pamuk on ‘dissatisfaction’ I was reading the “The New Lyric Studies” section of the January 2008 edition of PMLA but found the interview with Orhan Pamuk interesting as well. In it, Pamuk talks about his…
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‘Honour of the cucumber’ ‘Cucumber sandwiches’ — often a simplistic avatar of the English upper class in literature. I have never had one, have you? ’[P]oems are worth all the cucumber-sandwiches in the world […] the perfect green circles —…
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From Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (1978): You’re lovely. I’m crazy about you. All these words I’m using, don’t you see, they’ve never been said before. Can’t you see? I’m crazy about you. It’s a whirlwind. Have you ever been to the Sahara Desert? Listen…
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“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And…
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“Dear Toddlekins,” said little Trot,“May I talk to you a while?”“Why, yeth, of courthe,” said Toddlekins,With a bashful little smile. “Now, Toddlekins,” said little Trot,“If we should meet a bear”——“Good graciouth me!” said Toddlekins,“You give me thuch a thcare!” “If…
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Quote of the day 8 “You never seem to be waiting for me, but we kept meeting at every turn of the paths. Behind every bush, at the foot of each statue, near every pond. It is as if it had…
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This post was written on September 12, 2009 On Friday, we went to the Duke of York’s Theatre to watch Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. It was the first time we had been to this theatre and it was an interesting experience. The theatre seemed…
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Last May, we went to the National Theatre for a revival of London Assurance, an early Victorian comedy by Dion Boucicault (1841). The play received consistently good notices and we can see why. Although far from a perfect play, the…
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David Nicholls opens his hypnotic One Day (2009) with the following quote from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. How apt. That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine…
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Kyoko Mori answers in One Bird (1995): I raise my left arm and begin to wave as the birds disappear over the neighbor’s houses, and my eyes ache from staring into the sky. I know they will be back among the…
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. The title of Allan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty (2004) is a reference to William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1801): . the wavering line, which is a line more productive of beauty […], as in flowers, and other…
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– Nicholas Y.B. Wong’s poem “From My Window” is now published in Anomalous Press. There is also a recording of it. The second and third lines of the poem particularly caught my attention: ‘no squirrels fleeing from freezing / corners with their…
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– Re-reading Eddie’s poem “Whose Woods These Are”, I am reminded of what Umberto Eco says in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods:1 There are two ways of walking through a wood. The first is to try one or several…
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The partner bought me Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife in 2009. The collection features works ostensibly narrated by the wives of well-known historical and fictional men, famous men reimagined as women, or women who were well-known in their own right. Some…
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– “The superiority of intellectual to sensual pleasures consists rather in their filling up more time, in their having a larger range, and in their being less liable to satiety, than in their being more real and essential.” “Intemperance in…
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–– See this post about a famous parrot in the literary world. In Paul West’s Lord Byron’s Doctor (1989), J. W. Polidori writes, ‘He [Byron] never actually said Pretty Polly, but it was in his eye, all right, and I suppose I was a…
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The Kiss (1897-8) by Munch Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, answers in a Guardian article: [Virginia Woolf] wrote not at all about sex. Her entire body of work contains two romantic kisses – one in The Voyage Out, another…
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不想回憶, 未敢忘記 we stand on the side of the egg ::: 離 離 原 上 草 , 一 歲 一 枯 榮 。 野 火 燒 不 盡 , 春 風 吹 又 生 。 from 草 | 白 居 易
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[Click image to enlarge] “Here we are in old Shanghai. But many of the buildings here have a kind of symbol stamped on them. This means simply one word — DEMOLISH.” DEMOLISH. DEMOLISH. DEMOLISH. DEMOLISH. And so on. “The massive rebuilding programme…
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–Not entirely true. It seems to me that not only is largeness itself never willing to be large and small at the same time, but also that the largeness in us never admits the small, nor is it willing to…
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‘If Bob Dylan from the 60s took a look at stand-up comedy today, I think it would be a little bit like this’ –the comedian Stewart Lee: There’s a bus that never comes, except in threes.There’s a train that never…
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Back in 2008, the partner introduced me to a song by The Lucksmiths, “The Chapter in Your Life Entitled San Francisco” (click here to listen to the song). This love song is pleasant to listen to and the story is sad…
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In Chris Marker’s documentary, a woman narrates letters from a friend who is a world-traveller. He has been to Japan, Africa, Iceland, San Francisco, and France. The thought-provoking images and poetic commentary in this documentary invite us to meditate on…
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Artist: Annysa Ng Description: Fine Tea articles may be on any poems, stories or artwork/photography featured in the history of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. To see the kind of analyses we have published, please visit http://finecha.wordpress.com. However, you do not…
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…and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee . – Donne In the review article “Hubbub”, Nicholas Spice answers: [T]he most poignant encounters with music are inadvertent and unplanned. Church bells heard across the fields…
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We can only see the Sistine Chapel for the first time once, and we can never be surprised twice by the outcome of a poem or a novel, the unexpected modulations of a piece of Haydn or the wild ramifications…
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A Scene from “As You Like It” by Walter Howell Deverell If it be true that good wine needsno bush, ’tis true that a good play needs noepilogue; yet to good wine they do use good bushes,and good plays prove the…
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A.S. Byatt in The Children’s Book (2009) answers: But Julian was clever and observant enough to see that love was at its most intense before it was reciprocated. ‘Love is a standing, or still growing light / And his first…
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A.S. Byatt in The Children’s Book (2009) answers: He felt unreal in London, as though his flesh and blood were in abeyance, as though he was a simulacrum of a boy, floating along Gower Street with its prim houses, dodging…
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