It is a truth universal acknowledged...

There is a 12ft tall statue of Mr Darcy wading through the boating lake in Hyde Park complete with clinging wet look shirt a la Colin Firth. This is in honour of an open air production of Pride & Prejudice currently playing in the park (unfortunately I have been unable to get tickets).

I have been having a rather Regency time of it at the moment. I perennially find myself to falling back into the arms of dearest Jane when modernity fails me. There are too many Wickhams and Willoughbys abounding in my life.There is an awful part of me being English, that wishes for the monochrome social rules of the era (I know this is foolish, I'd be bored, poor, or on a plantation somewhere, not the mistress of a grand house with Corinthian columns) Today I have been watching Regency House Party on 4oD, wandered around Putney because the Thorpes were resident there, trying to imagine it two hundred years ago and read Mansfield Park in the sunshine. Although I must confess that of Austen's six completed works I have only read four, having been somewhat put off by the 1990s version of Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow and just having never gotten round to picking up Sense & Sensibility, but did love the Emma Thompson version. I do sometimes worry that Austen is a backwards step for feminism, but I cannot give her up, just like a thumb-sucking child.

Being beaten by a book, and being challenged

At heart I am a Victorian who thoroughly believes in self improvement and yet I am also one of those people that even if I'm quite enjoying a book, will sometimes put it down and never pick it up again. I only recently read The Great Gatsby - pleasantly vapid and purposefully shallow, I have been informed by a friend that she believes it not to be Fitzgerald's finest - all the way through, as I felt duty-bound to read it before I saw the film . I started to read I, Claudius summer '09 as my holiday reading in Paris, thoroughly enjoying it, and still have failed to complete it. With that in mind Katy Guest wrote an article in The Indie about saving yourself the time and the agony of persevering with a dull book. I really, really want to love Henry James and yet I can't. I can't bare his prose, it's so unnecessary and meandering. Perhaps one day I will come to appreciate his works in the same way that I enjoy his compatriot Edith Wharton's, but right now I have neither the time nor the inclination to stick it out.

 http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/reading-a-dull-book-put-it-down-this-instant-8707418.html

For all my quasi-intellectual posturing  I wish I was more well-read than I actually am. As I get older it becomes more and more apparent how deficient I am. The Grauniad a few years ago published a list of the 1000 novels that everyone should read and twice I have challenged myself to have a good crack at it, as I'm only in double figures. I reckon that if I make a public announcement of my intent, then I should at least have it a bloody good crack at it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction

The Rules:

1. I will not count a book as read unless I am acquainted with both covers and all the troublesome content in between.
2. If, by Chapter 3, I cannot bear it any longer then I will put it down.
3. I won't allow myself to become a dinner party bore as a result of the challenge. 
4. I will choose books at random so as not to reaffirm my prejudices.
5. If it costs me more than £7 on my kindle then I won't read it either.
6. I'll bother you all with updates. 

So many words so little time!

Armchair Voyage

Two of my favourite things in the world are Ancient Greece and proper diction:


http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p017h0rz/Armchair_Voyage_Hellenic_Cruise_Venice_to_Mycenae/

TED Meg Jay: Why 30 is not the new 20

Occasionally I partake in intellectual self-harm, I browse the Daily Fail Online. Read the articles about so-and-so's cellulite (it's a secondary sexual characteristic, geez leave women alone), whatsamajigs gym routine and how dust is the new super food. I general manage to avoid their misbegotten political arguments, if I want hysteria I normally veer between The Grauniad and The Torygraph for mutual bouts of silliness. Occasionally however it does through up a gem - although this article about Meg Jay's TED talk, one  does suspect, is part of their general contempt for young women.

“When you pat a twentysomething on the head and you say, ‘You have 10 extra years to start your life’ … you have robbed that person of his urgency and ambition.”

Meg Jay is as quotable as I am young and pretty damned impatient.

Click below for the full video:
TED: Why 30 is not the new 20



Epiphany.

Pop video of the week x: Super Junior M, Breakdown

Enjoy!

Calling all Japanophiles!

Right! my wonderful friend Hayley has started writing a blog about her moving to Japan to become an English teacher over there! Ganbatte!

http://hayleydesu.blogspot.co.uk/

Cx

The Whitechapel Gallery: Gert and Uwe Tobias; Karl Blossfeldt

The Whitechapel Gallery is a favourite of mine. In part this is due to its proximity to Brick Lane and the beigel shop. The home of ironically dressing like your grandfather was more hip replacement than hipster, with noticeable tourist and yummy mummy contingents (reverse snobbery over, although tourist is quite frankly the dirtiest word in the entirety of the English language).

Enticed there on an awful overcast English spring day was I by Gert and Uwe Tobias. I was not especially bothered by the majority of the exhibition, but the three large paintings towards the end of the exhibit and currently being sold as the accompanying postcards I did enjoy. Their practise described in the press release as "working across different artistic traditions, the artists dissolve boundaries between craft and fine art, abstract concept and unconscious fantasy, and modernity and tradition", was rather like William Morris on a trip. I did in fact buy one of the postcards to send to my textile designing cousin.

Continuing with botany as a theme the Karl Blossfeldt photography exhibition made a much greater impression on me as whole than the Tobiases did. Something in the shape of the forms he captured affected me in an almost ineffable way.

What I will also say about The Whitechapel is that it has a ruddy good bookshop. I normally have to be frogmarched past them in other institutions but this time I was both on my own and at leisure so had a long time to peruse its shelves. Following my awful foray in the pretences of hipsterdom earlier in this post, I noted So You Think You're a Hipster in the shop. Tempted to buy it, yes I was. Fearfully of finding myself described inside its pages, inevitable.

Props to my girl

Textile fans check it out!

http://dipdyeddaisy.blogspot.co.uk/

An Austenite

I hate myself for such a cliche but Darcy is the most delicious depressive that one could ever fall for. Is it terrible that my first love was a character written two hundred years ago? Although I believe this makes for more of a meaningful comment on the disagreeable fifteen year olds that I went to school with than myself. Yet I still know the very first sentence of Pride & Prejudice off by heart.

Having just reread Northanger Abbey for the umpteenth time and finding it to have grown that little bit more charming as I have grown that little bit more older, Auntie has so wonderfully reconstructed The Netherfield ball in honour of the P&P bicentennial. I so want to play dress up with them and dance la boulangerie. I am so thoroughly wasted on the C21th.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01sf0q6/Pride_and_Prejudice_Having_a_Ball/


The documentary was co-presented by Dr Amanda Vickery, whose book The Gentleman's Daughter, I coincidentally have began reading. Nothing like a bit of feminist social history for the dull daily commute to my desk.

Apologies for the long absence

Dearest all

Apologies for such a long absence, life got on top of me. But hey, I'm back, stay posted for postings.

C x