A Strong Belief in Wicker: November 2016

Thursday, 17 November 2016

Twelve Books to Read About Paris

A wonderful Parisian list created for Good Reading September 2015 by Patti Miller, a longtime Paris devote, who wrote Ransacking Paris (see my review).

Patti describes this list as an 'amuse-bouche', and warns us that once you have begun "There is never any ending to Paris." It's far too late for me to read those words, I've been well and truly drawn in by Paris, and indeed there is never any end to Paris for me.

It does seem that I have lots of reading left to do...

Paris: The Secret History - Andrew Hussey

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame - Victor Hugo

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer - Patrick Suskind

Old Goriot - Honoré de Balzac

Missing Person - Patrick Modiano

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter or The Mandarins - Simone de Beauvoir

A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway

The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery

True Pleasures: A Memoir of Women in Paris - Lucinda Holdforth

This is Paris - Miroslav Sasek

Un Peu de Paris - Sempé

Writers in Paris - David Burke

2/12

A particularly dismal effort. I did take both Notre Dame de Paris and The Elegance of the Hedgehog to Paris on different trips but always spend too much time holidaying to get to reading much at all and so they remain unread.

Wednesday, 9 November 2016

The Borrowers

I just finished a re-read of The Borrowers, and enjoyed it just as much as I remembered it. Mary Norton's classic story came out in 1952. I first read it as an adult, only about 5-10 years ago I think. I remembered that the Borrowers were a family of tiny folk that lived hidden away in a grand house and “borrowed” the things that they’d needed from the house, but I wasn’t able to really remember any of the specifics. I remembered that I’d liked it, and was happy to find that I really liked it again on this rereading.

The basic setup feels quite a lot like The Secret Garden (see my review), where a lonely child who grew up in India is rattling round a big old country house. But this is where the similarities end, and here one day the boy finds a family of small people who live under the floor boards, the Clocks. But the child is not the hero here, it is the Borrower daughter, Arrietty, a lonely girl who is the only child of the solitary family of Borrowers left in the house.

'Oh, I know papa is a wonderful Borrower. I know we've managed to stay when all the others have gone. But what has it done for us, in the end? I don't think it's so great to live on alone, for ever and ever, in a great, big, half-empty house; under the floor, with no one to talk to, no one to play with, nothing to see but dust and passages, no light but candlelight and firelight and what comes through the cracks.'

Arrietty's father, Pod, is the Borrower for the family, and he generally has the run of the place because there are only three humans inhabiting the house- Great Aunt Sophy a bedridden invalid who likes to partake of a decanter of Madeira each night, Mrs Driver the cook and Crampfurl (a most splendid name) the gardener. That is until the boy comes to stay, and Arrietty’s father Pod is "seen".

The Borrowers is such a wonderful, make believe world, vividly told, it makes me wish that there were little people living under my floor borrowing from my possessions to survive.

There have been a number of film versions of The Borrowers over the years. All seem to need to update and modify the original story in some way. A 1997 movie has John Goodman as a developer looking to knock down a Borrower house. A 2011 BBC telemovie starring Stephen Fry and Christopher Eccleston is a Christmas themed adaptation. Happily I found it lurking unwatched on my hard drive recorder the other day. I've watched it now, and even better I find it is available on youtube complet en francais!

Saturday, 5 November 2016

A History of the World in 100 Objects

On our recent trip to the South Coast Master Wicker and I had a quick stopover in Canberra where we caught a couple of fascinating exhibitions. I showed you Bigger on the Inside last week. We also went to the National Museum of Australia to see the amazing A History of the World in 100 Objects from the British Museum.

It was really worth work a look. We spent about two hours there, although I think Master Wicker was done in about an hour. I don't think I've ever seen an Egyptian mummy before, and I'd certainly never seen the chronometer from the HMS Beagle, or realised how very small the worlds first coins were. I will share some of the objects I enjoyed most, or found particularly fascinating, and were easy to photograph.

A great deal of information can be discovered through the close study of a single object. Individual things, when approached in the right way, can unlock an understanding of how people lived- from how they worshipped to what they ate.

It was fascinating to see the remnants of the earliest writing. Incredible to see these 5, 000 year old objects so remarkably preserved, and the origins of reading and writing that I hold so dear.

Early writing tablet
3100-3000 BCE
Southern Iraq
Clay

A cuneiform tablet showing part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, "the first great epic poem in world literature". A man is warned by God of an impending flood, and told to build a boat to save his family. It predates the Old Testament story of Noah and his Ark.

Flood tablet
700-600 BCE
Kouyunjik (Nineveh), Iraq
Clay

Axes were the principal tool of early humans for about a million years! This beautiful one is near perfect and thought not to have been used.

Jade Axe
5000-3600 BCE
Biebrech, Germany

Statue of Ramses II
About 1280 BCE
Temple of Khnum, Elephantine, Egypt

Bust of Sophocles
About 150 CE
Lazio, Italy
Marble

Head of Augustus
27-25 BCE
Meroë, Sudan
Bronze, glass, calcite

I learnt that Buddha's long earlobes is a sign of his rejection of wealth - because he was born into wealth he had worn the customary heavy earrings which stretched his lobes, and we see this still after he has renounced the world to seek enlightenment.

Seated Buddha from Gandhara
100-300 CE
Gandhara, Pakistan
Stone

Master Wicker's favourite object.

Arabian Bronze Hand
100-300 CE
Yemen

I think this statue was my favourite object, even though it is quite grisly.

Statue of Mithras
100-200 CE
Rome, Italy

The museum folks have done a great job with the installation of the exhibition- it's a stunning mix of old and new, the objects from antiquity displayed with modern accents, there's a great feel to the space, it's lovely just to be there, despite the admiring hordes.

Naturally I had an audio tour as I'm an audio tour kind of gal but there was really very good introductions to each area, as well as printed descriptions of each object. Some objects also had short videos displayed nearby introducing the objects by staff of the British Museum. All very informative.

I tend to think of blue and white porcelain as Delftware, but this is a Chinese plate, and the cobalt blue used was imported from the Middle East, possibly Iran, so apparently the Chinese call it Muslim Blue. Which makes sense when you think of all the old mosques decorated so beautifully with blue and white tiles.

Chinese blue and white dish
1330-1350 CE
Jingdezhen, Jiangxi provence, China

I really liked Dürer's Rhinoceros too- beautifully done, and all the more amazing because naturally he'd never seen a Rhinoceros in 16th century Germany. There was a very cool hologram Rhinoceros nearby.

Albrecht Dürer's Rhinoceros
1515 CE
Nuremberg, Germany

North American Frock Coat
1800-1900 CE
Canada
Painted moose skin, porcupine quills and otter hair

War Shields
1990-2000 CE
Wahgi Valley, Papua New Guinea
Painted wood, metal, rubber, fibre

Outside the exhibition is a wonderful tactile table where you can touch replicas of some objects. There were also Braille descriptions of the objects next to the English.