Category: t
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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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A.S. Byatt in The Children’s Book (2009) answers: Money was freedom. Money was aesthetic. Money was Arab stallions, not rough cobs. Money was not being shouted at. […] Money was freedom. Money was life. -p. 59 How poor can one…
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A.S. Byatt in The Children’s Book (2009) answers: The parents […] found it hard in practice to do what they believed in theory they should do, which was to love all the children equally. A man and a woman with…
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Text by Melvyn Bragg. Images and [insertions] by yours truly. ‘Union Jack’ or ‘Union Flag’ – say ‘Union Flag’ if you want to sound upper class. I saw London en fete. Union Jacks, five abreast, went from Upper Regent Street,…
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Or how I categorise the Cha submissions….. Or how I categorise people….. – – – –––
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[click image to enlarge] John Everett Millais’s Esther (1865) | Handmade oil painting The story might be that of a Jewish queen from the Old Testament, but it is the swathe of yellow silk that immediately strikes the viewers. Millais is…
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