dovegreyreader scribbles

Knitting update...

2009-11-22T00:15:00+00:00

I was having a browse through the V&A online collection thanks to a link from Karen at Cornflower.
I'm really looking forward to the V&A's exhibition of British quilts coming up in March 2010 and I'd had a look at those and was just idly flicking through the knitting collection which Karen had warned would happen, it's addictive and interesting and then I hit the third page .
Nothing quite like spotting something of your own which is now in the V&A as I realised when I saw this.

This was my mum's Knitting Nancy, "keeps our little girls busy" and handed on to me as a child and look, there's even some on there that I've done earlier...well, about fifty years earlier I think.

It did keep me busy and don't ask me how many miles of this I made and never quite knew what to do with next and it would seem that 'Wendy', whose box now resides in the V&A didn't know either because she's made 810cms of it.
I think the idea was to stitch it into a coil and make place mats and things but mine never got that far and nor can I believe that a six year old would now be allowed to wield that lethal stabbing needle thing, how nobody lost an eye we'll never know.

Carrying on with my completer-finisher pledge these are off the needles and ready for the feet.

Don't you just love the unpredictability of a ball of Noro?
This used about two thirds of one skein leftover from the gilet and a standard top-down sock pattern invention using 36 sts on 6mm dpns. Doing the maths that meant 18 stitches (half) for the heel flap and then picking up 9 stitches (quarter) each side of the flap once the heel was turned and into gussetting. Very quick to do and perhaps a really good starter sock now I think about it because you get encouraging results in a single evening.
Hopefully that makes sense to all you sock-knitters out there and what a plethora of them I have come across in all this wartime reading.
Then a little gift of a hat for the new baby of a work colleague and finished off with my first attempt at something called I-cord, (aka Idiot cord and invented by Elizabeth Zimmerman) so simple to do on dpns once I'd got the hang of it and which in the end resembled all those yards of Knitting Nancy.

It's theatre time

2009-11-21T00:15:00+00:00

Things like buses do come in threes, perhaps they even come in fours and fives and we just stop counting but three it is for this month's theatre visits.
I shall be a fully-fledged Westend Whinger apprentice by the end of November and have been cutting my teeth again on the annual village drama production before moving onwards and upwards to the Theatre Royal in Plymouth and thence to the pinnacle of my theatrical month, London, the music, the greasepaint, the boards and the bright lights, by which time I will be an expert.
I didn't take my camera so have had to rely on last year's pictures to illustrate, but little changes front of house.
We'd decided against taking a box in the village hall and settled on plastic chairs seats in the front row of the dress circle also known as Row E. Rows A-D being the stalls and Rows H to the back, the gods.

Pre-show supper was in the kitchen watching the news before remembering to exchange slippers for shoes and heading into the traffic.
Nightmare I tell you, we should have allowed far more than five minutes, seven at least.
Rush hour...country lanes...who'd drive 'em.
More time spent going backwards than forwards and then the parking ...well don't even get me started on the parking.
Twas a rotten stormy evening, severe weather warnings urging us not to venture forth unless absolutely necessary but we'd paid £5 a ticket and there was a raffle. You might recall my success at the Village Show raffle back in September so clearly the village hall a source of great luck and good fortune for me as long as the roof stayed on and only lifted with the rapturous applause, not the force ten gales.
It's a little corrugated iron structure and there were no certainties but we all piled in as usual.

Bookhound and I settled down in our front row of the dress circle seats, right alongside the Playgroup, which we now have to call Pre-School, notice board and some very nice colouring-in and glittery pictures. We'd forgotten the chocolates but the row behind hadn't so it was good to have that regular rustling going on as we settled down to enjoy Trivial Pursuits by Frank Vickery. Unfortunately we were also seated behind the tallest man in West Devon but we managed.
Here's the plot...

"The leading lights of the Trealow & District Operatic Society meet at director Nick and his wife, Roz's home to hear what their next production will be. As the evening wears on everyone has far too much to drink and some members try to influence Nick's choice of the new production - by all sorts of devious means. They drink even more and lots of bitchy bickering breaks out.
Derek cannot get used to his impending divorce and Deidre, his soon to be ex-wife arrives with a new man - television addict Eddie (in real life the man from the garden centre)
Nick is having an affair with Jessica (in real life the practice nurse from the surgery)
Joyce a once talented actress is an alcoholic.
Teddy is delightfully camp and alternately sweet and strident.
There are plenty of mishaps - the barbecue wont light and then when paraffin is poured on it it goes up in flames and Teddy is badly burnt. Eddie climbs on the roof to change the television aerial to get better reception and Derek agrees to donate money to the Society as long as Deidre gets a leading role.
And what will the next production be??"

Enough there to keep us all amused and it was of course hilarious, moments of pure farce, brilliant acting as always, the funniest finale I have seen in many a long year which had us all crying with laughter and all replete with those wonderfully endearing moment of AmDram production
...the hand that creeps out to assist the recalcitrant curtain stuck on the rope pulley opening device.
...the prompt who comes in after a bit of a silence with a whispered line.
Then in the interval the tubs of ice cream, (the Whingers would not have approved, no bar) though sadly my luck was out with the raffle.
So that's my first November theatre event done, two to go.

The Tamar, roused and blinking...

2009-11-20T00:15:00+00:00

There's a line in Anna Akhmatova's poem Requiem which comes into my mind whenever I see or hear a river

'Quietly flows the quiet Don;
into the house slips the yellow moon...'

I have no idea why that line became the essence of that poem for me but it did, along with a couple of others like

'I've woven them a garment that's prepared
out of poor words, those that I overheard..'

Most of the time it's quietly flows the quiet Tamar here, it just trips along across the way and apart from the ethereal early morning mist that hovers over the river and follows it around the valley in front of us, we don't even know it's there.

You may recall the river looked like this a few weeks ago.

Until we have a few days of a drenching downpour that is and like many of you we've had torrential of late.
Then I can only think of Ted Hughes' poem Rain Charm for the Duchy in which he brings all the rivers of Devon to life with the awakening battle cry of a storm that ends months of drought...

'Thunder was breaking up the moors. It dragged tors over the city..'

and we get a mention.

'And the Tamar, roused and blinking under the fifty-mile drumming,
Declaiming her legend - her rusty knights tumbling out of their
clay vaults, her cantrevs assembling from shillets,
With a cheering of aged stones along the Lyd and the Lew, the
Wolf and the Thrushel...'

Cantrevs appropriately 'small kingdoms' I discover, so from that rural, back-of-beyond kingdom of our own choosing, and accustomed as we are to its silence, you open the bedroom windows and immediately hear that distant river-roar.
So a break in the weather and there seemed to be enough blue sky to make a sailor a pair of trousers, which is supposed to be a good sign, and I set off on a book-thinking walk down to the river to have a look.
At this stage please note the word 'down'.
The road is long but hardly winding to begin with

and the skies cleared enough to kit out the entire navy and a lovely view of yonder homestead from various gateways

Plenty of surface water

and then uncertain skies

Finally the Tamar, roused, blinking and definitely drumming,

and with a precarious lean a glimpse of the debris under the bridge...there's a job for someone...somehow

So with all that downhill, there can only be one way back and that's up and it's steep, so I'm afraid I cheated. Bookhound arrived, we had a swift half in the pub and then home

Dew on the Grass by Eiluned Lewis

2009-11-19T00:15:00+00:00

Dew on the Grass by Eiluned Lewis, (Welsh expertise please...Ay-loo-ned ?) and first published in 1934, has been another happy read and a gorgeous cover from Honno Press.
Unlike my last Honno foray into the writing of Margiad Evans aka Peggy Whistler from Uxbridge, Eiluned Lewis was born and bred in the Welsh countryside in 1900, the daughter of a wealthy Montgomeryshire landowner Hugh Lewis and his wife Eveline.
The family lived in comfortable circumstances at Glan Hafran and Dew on the Grass is another fictional autobiography, a child's eye view of life in Wales in the early twentieth century and offering a very different perspective to the poverty-stricken mining community accounts that I have also been reading.
There are pictures of Glan Hafran and its surroundings but also the visitors, J.M.Barrie and the Lost Boys; Michael and Nicholas Llewellyn Davies were regular guests and joined in all the theatricals of which the young Eiluned, Lucy in the book, is so fond.
Interestingly it was another Lost Boy, Peter Davies, who first published Dew on the Grass in 1934.
Nine-year old Lucy is the younger sister of Delia with six-year old brother Maurice whose measurements are all etched on the stable door along with three year old Miriam

'who ran to width rather than height and barely managed to reach the keyhole.'

What follows is an evocative, enchanting stream-of-consciousness account of a child's life through a child's eyes, a compression of childhood memory released with all those seemingly minor incidents that assume such great significance with the application of a nine-year old mind.
Between them, Lucy and Delia have sufficient imaginative resources to sustain a nation and day after day they are allowed to exercise it with play and make-believe, all occasionally interrupted by education in the shape of a visiting teacher who tries to put the girls through their paces, but largely against the odds when the freedom and adventures of Pengarth (Glan Hafran) beckon. Children's maid Louisa also has her hands full with Lucy's regular dramatic re-enactments of imaginary adventures

'Lucy would begin in a thrilling voice: 'She put her foot on the cold marble step..."
'Don't go putting your bare feet on the washstand." Louisa interrupted
"She looked at the great keep above her." the tragic tale went on; "the rushing moat below. And all around she heard the sound of war and tumult. Then a voice cried:' Mother! Mother' but she answered: 'Daughter! Daughter! What canst I do for thee?'...
'Naught! Naught! I will cast myself into the moat below.' "
"You'll break the springs of the bed if you carry on like that," remarked Louisa folding up the clothes.'

There are all those certainties of childhood, the world that seems to revolve around a child's magnificent flights of imaginative fancy and parents who are able to provide for this to happen; there's no question it's a privileged world with only occasional intrusions from the realities of the poverty of those around them. A fire in an estate cottage and we learn little of what happens to the occupants, Lucy's father much more exercised over how he will rebuild, whilst the arrival of a tramp signifies the destitution and poverty that was blighting the mining communities.

Plenty of timeless childhood moments of nostalgia too.
The counting games to choose who would be 'it' ..."Ip dip sky blue, who's it not you" in my day, Lucy has something far more interesting involving the Virgin Mary.
Then that fishpond game with the rods and lines with the magnets on the end.
What about the way the eyes always came out of a teddy bear (horrors...remember them on great long bits of lethal wire?) and the teddy had to remain eyeless ever after because putting them back in just made them look all wrong.
In fact look, I found my second-best bear, the eyeless Bimbo who would be impressed upon me when I'd been sick on the equally eyeless best bear Fred, who was a complete person with a soul and feelings and was very real let me tell you, and who would have to be mysteriously whisked off for 'laundering'.

There's just no way to make Bimbo look pretty or to convey even the merest hint of what he meant to me as a child or how I felt when he needed surgical intervention... I hope you've all got strong stomachs, I'm having to look away when I see this, I probably cried for weeks. In fact it's all reminding me that I passed it onto my own children, Offspringette was distraught for days when her beloved Marmite's head came off and I was a nervous wreck trying to stitch it back on.

There are some gloriously funny moments in Dew on the Grass too, a child's impression of hymns and the day Lucy ponders about heaven,

'I thought that everyone in heaven - Jesus and the angels and all - went to bed in a long room, and in the early morning I would get up, very quietly, and put on my cap and apron and cook breakfast and make the coffee. Then when Jesus woke up He would be very surprised and pleased and say: " Well done thou good and faithful servant!"

Lucy, the writer in the family proceeds to compose a Liturgy of her own for an all-purpose pet's funeral,

O dog of dogs, have mercy on us sinners,
Be good to us, O King, and make us joyful;
Save us from all breaking and illness... ARMEN'

So a childhood exquisitely recalled but with that growing realisation that Delia will be the first to leave this safe world of the imagination and head off for boarding school; suddenly Delia is above it all and owns a proper tennis racquet and life will never be quite the same at Pengarth / Glan Hafran again.
Katie Gramich's excellent introduction offers more unique insights into Lucy's frequent blurring of those boundaries between the real and the imaginary which for me made reading this book such a pleasure, and any mention of comparisons of this child-centred narrative to the short stories of Katherine Mansfield is always going to strike the right note too. Likened in her lifetime to a host of good authors...Jane Austen, Mrs Gaskell, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Arthur Ransome and Kenneth Grahame, I have to agree with Reginald Massey, it is indeed sad that Eiluned Lewis is almost forgotten today.
But really it's Lucy aka Eiluned herself that you love for the way that the world of the grown-up makes so little sense

'How did grown-ups manage to exist all day with so little imagination? They even dressed in the morning without imagining themselves other than they were, whereas Lucy felt that she could never bear to put on clothes at all if she were not consoled at every phase by pretending to be someone else - the Young Acrobat, the White Lady or the Innocent Child.'

On making space...

2009-11-18T00:15:00+00:00

So the books have been arriving for about three years now and I have read quite a lot of them, skimmed plenty more, read the first few pages of most and only a few have remained mostly unopened... Zombies - A Record of the Year of Infection has been a tough call. But eventually we had reached tipping point, many were not going to get a third chance and something had to give before it was the foundations of the house. Books not only from the last three years of dovegreyreader but from the last forty or more of book buying.
I have also finally convinced myself that I really don't need four copies of Middlemarch, five of Pride and Prejudice, doubles if not trebles of most of Dickens... which is a bit rich when I'm not a devoted die hard fan, quadruples of all the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald's and so it went on...and on.
How odd then that I go on a little stroll to visit old friends around the blogosphere and find that over at Me and My Big Mouth, Scott Pack has been doing likewise.
Like Scott, I know those I might want to read and those I want to keep and I also give many of the others away to friends and old work colleagues, but eventually I think people even get fed up with that.
Selling them would probably be sensible just to pay the monthly Typepad bill, but in fact that's now covered by those clicks to The Book Depository ( that many of you make from the link over here >>>>> and thank you for every one of them.) Selling is fine if I've paid for the books in the first place, but so many have come to me free, and something just doesn't feel quite right about that.
So I set to and blazed a trail through it all a few weeks ago, it took all day and Bookhound finally delivered twenty eight bags of books to the The Children's Hospice South West shop in Tavistock last week and narrowly avoided a parking ticket in the process.
The poor volunteers had to sit down and do some deep breathing as they surveyed the floor from till to door and the carrier bags snaking around the shop, but they are well-stocked for a while and I have known so many families who have benefited from children's hospice care, so the cause feels completely local and worthwhile.
But I almost feel like I can breath again, though I wonder if you struggle to part with books as I do?
It really is against my religion so I have to pick the book up first, gaze at it and see if I get a pang, which could be why it took all day.
I can't describe a pang, it's just a fleeting moment when even the most obscure book can exert an unspoken influence and hint at future usefulness, who knows when I might need it.
The first unwanted book is the worst, after that it gets easier and soon I was running out of bags and it felt good too; being surrounded by a bottom-less pit of un-read-ness, which looked likely to remain unread, had been starting to feel weighty, to crowd and panic me a bit.
This of course not an entirely risk-free strategy because there is every chance that Bookhound, doing his rounds of the bookshelves in the town's charity shops, will buy back one of my own books having picked it up and got that pang that he gets of the 'this might come in useful' variety.
This could just go on into infinity and beyond.
I do now however feel quite light as a feather, the house foundations seem safe for a while and can you believe I got a bit of a pang when I opened Zombies - The Year of Infection and kept it?
Who knows how handy that might be because I hate to tell all the purists and the Janeites out there but, in need of humour, I bought a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith at Paddington station, realising that I'd been in London all day and hadn't bought a single book, and I'm really sorry but I'm afraid I was ....well... er.... I was enraged at the desecration of a sacrosanct text shaking with laughter before the train had even got past the points and the signal box,

'Unmentionables poured in, their movements clumsy yet swift...some wore gowns so tattered as to render them scandalous...
'As guests fled in every direction, Mr Bennet's voice cut through the commotion. "Girls! Pentagram of Death!"
Elizabeth immediately joined her four sisters in the centre of the dance floor. Each girl produced a dagger from her ankle and stood at the tip of an imaginary five-pointed star...by the time the girls reached the walls of the assembly hall, the last of the unmentionables lay still...

When Jane and Elizabeth were alone, the former, who had been cautious in her praise of Mr Bingley before, expressed to her sister just how very much she admired him
"He is just what a young man ought to be," said she, " sensible, good-humoured, lively; and I never saw such happy manners! So much ease with such perfect good breeding!"
" Yes," replied Elizabeth, "but in the heat of the battle, neither he nor Mr Darcy were to be found with blade or bludgeon."

I'm not sure whether the conceit will stand up to 300 pages-worth of unrelenting mayhem. I fear not and I suspect the originality and humour may wear a bit thin after repetition, but it lasted all the way to Exeter which was good enough for me and I couldn't help but wonder what the very nearly Mrs Bigg-Wither would have made of it all.

Legend of a Suicide by David Vann

2009-11-17T00:15:00+00:00

Legend of a Suicide by David Vann arrived from Penguin with plaudits months ago and I shelved it but I knew I would have to read it.
David Vann admits in his acknowledgments that he was writing about an uncomfortable topic, his father's suicide during his own childhood and confiding that

'there's exposure in these stories. They're fictional but based on a lot that's true.'

To my mind that's a high risk personal strategy involving courage and emotional maturity, a confidence in your own ability to be able to take it all out and look at it again, probably recall some of the most traumatic events in your life, because the suicide of a close relative forces those left behind to traverse a lifelong territory they had no intention of crossing.
That journey can be a minefield and, whilst reading Legend of a Suicide as fiction, I inevitably spent a great deal of time wondering where those mines had been laid for David Vann. If something like this happens in childhood the problem is compounded, that loss has to be re-experienced again and again through each stage into adulthood and beyond, each time it surfaces it may be as raw and excruciating as it the day it happened, so I don't underestimate the difficulties David Vann may have encountered.
Phyllis Silverman has written one of the best books I have come across on the subject of bereaved children, those young but 'fully-fledged mourners', A Parent's Guide to Raising Grieving Children. I refer to it constantly in my day to day work and she talks of her book as a 'road map for a long journey'. I know the 'journey' word is becoming a bit of a cliche these days (from X Factor to Strictly via I'm a Celeb) but in the context of mourning I cannot think of a better one, and David Vann's book feels like an integral part of his own journey and that need to make sense of what had happened, perhaps to understand.
Whilst it may be stating the obvious to issue a health warning I'd be negligent not to, Legend of a Suicide may inevitably make for traumatic reading if you have any experience of such a tragedy and
brace yourself for a massive shock about half way through too, quite a devastatingly bizarre and unexpected twist that threw me off course completely. I was settling in and expecting one story when quite suddenly it was as if I'd been turfed out of a slightly uncomfortable hammock, but one I was just about managing to keep balanced and on an even keel.
I metaphorically spent the rest of the book lying on a hard cushionless floor.
The title seemed to be offering me first clues with the various interpretations of that word 'legend', both as an event acquiring mythical status, but also in twenty-first century speak as a hero.
Roy and his father Jim are both legend and hero to each other, but that realisation comes in various ways and at differing times in the book as perceptions are shattered and reshaped constantly between them. Legend of a Suicide consists of five novellas of varying length and narrative perspective and to approach it as a novel makes for interesting reading because it becomes almost impossible to get a sense of reading continuity between them. Each one positions reader and characters slightly differently and perhaps that is the point, the disjointed, jarring moments that don't quite seem to fit and are quite unsettling, once I'd been turned out of that hammock my confusion perhaps mirrored that of the characters in the book.
I haven't told you much about the plot and I don't really want to focus on that for fear of giving anything away but it is Sukkwan Island the backwoods Alaskan survival experience shared by Jim and a thirteen-year old Roy that forms the backbone of the book. Roy becomes father to the man, disturbed by, yet sensitive and perceptive to the needs of his father, whilst Jim is completely unable to 'send his life into another's' and understand his son.
I suspect that like me you will tell no one the details of that shock moment if you read the book.
We have to keep the faith about it as we have kept it over Kevin in Lionel Shriver's book. If someone tries to tell you before you read this, just block your ears and la-la your way through it.
Carol Staudacher in another really excellent book, Beyond Grief, suggests,

' It is vital to understand that suicide is not solely the result of some sudden-bizarre impulse; nor is it one single act which can be isolated and analyzed without examining the whole life context in which it occurred.'

And to some extent that is what David Vann has explored in Legend of a Suicide.
I rarely read what the review pages have to say while I'm reading a book, a bit like I won't ask for directions if I'm lost, I just have to figure these things out for myself and it may take me some time, but once I'd drafted out my thoughts I did have a skate around and this book is getting some really good and well-deserved coverage,
I just can't better Tom Bissell's splendid observation in the New York Times Review so I have to share it here

'The central event of "Sukkwan Island," shocking for several reasons, appears to take place in a parallel universe. The Roy and the father of the other stories cannot be the Roy and the father of this story. Vann does not choose to explain this, and he should not have to. But it is strange, like encountering Borges, in waders, within "A River Runs Through It."

and I was quite relieved to see that Observer reviewer Alexander Linklater and I are of like mind

'Then there is the third thing you need to know which is, rather, something you must not know. As this book reimagines its central death, an event occurs that utterly transforms the encounter between protagonist, father, author and reader. Do not let anyone tell you what this event is before you start. To know what happens in advance would be to spoil not just a narrative surprise in a heart-thumping tale, but the entire apparatus Vann has constructed to wrench out the dreadful and meaningless facts of existence, to master them, and, in a violent act of fictional transmogrification, to reconfigure them as something not less, but more real.'

It wasn't just me that fell out of my hammock and took a vow of silence then.
So I hope I've given you the essence, an emotionally charged and challenging book but one that is echoing and reverberating in mind still, moments when I really thought I might suffocate as I read, but having fought my way to the surface and the final page, a book I am actually glad to have read.
Now it has me searching my shelves for more father and son books and I seem to have a dearth beyond Turgenev's Fathers and Sons and Joseph Roth's Zipper and His Father, so all suggestions welcome.
Meanwhile, if you decide to read Legend of a Suicide I'd love to know your thoughts.

Team Ulysses - Camp Five

2009-11-16T00:15:00+00:00

A really tricky reading month here but I'm not going to mess with the mountain or make excuses Team Ulysses because I think that's been more about me than the book. It's all been down to other books which I haven't wanted to set aside and trips away which play havoc with life in general and my reading in particular. I choose traveling reading which is most definitely not Ulysses, so I knew I was going to be very last minute, if I made it at all.
But I did and even managed some background reading from Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation - A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties & Thirties by Noel Riley Fitch.
The more I read the more I feel I want to know (it always happens, I can't stop myself) about this book's background and its genesis in the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop. James Joyce declared by Leon Edel in the puffs on the book to be

'the most incredible literary leech of all time.'

But with relevance to the two sections I have read this time, Sirens and Cyclops just knowing those extra details about the friendship between Sylvia Beach and Joyce has added an extra level of enjoyment to this month's reading.
James Joyce described in a play by Tom Stoppard as

'an essentially private man who wishes his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized'

The whole process of publication seems to have been akin to the twelve labours of Hercules for the poor long-suffering Sylvia Beach who admitted that Joyce's affairs were considerably more trouble to her than many an ordinary author. This all compounded by her willingness to allow Joyce the indefinite right to correct the proofs. Joyce made copious additions and the proofs became legendary for containing more handwriting than print.

' There were light moments of friendhsip and mutual excitement associated with the birth of Ulysses. Joyce would read aloud from Ulysses for her, often the Cyclops section. They would burst into peals of laughter at Joyce's rendering of the dog and joke about the growth of the novel. Joyce would tell her that Ulysses was no longer than many other novels, such as The Forsyte Saga, only instead of running into many volumes, his was packed into on hold-all.'

Sirens was a mystery read in a cloud of unknowing here, and but for footnotes I would have had little idea of the musical connotations that Joyce was aiming for. The deeper into Ulysses I wander the more aware I become of those parts which need to be read aloud and which I do in a sort of sotto voce mutter which would sound very odd if you overheard me. But I am also picking up the Odysseyian hints more frequently and given my scant knowledge of the sirens and their ability to lure the sailors onto the rocks, though I nearly ended up on the rocks again myself, I did see those analogies with the bar maids and the punters. I did emerge from that section, yet again, and to my ongoing complete and utter amazement, with some sense of what had happened, and of course laughing at Leopold's final Pprrpffrrppfff.
How long did it take James Joyce to work out how to spell flatulence I wonder?
With occasional mention of stars fading, that line from The Duchess of Malfi also kept flitting into my mind,

'Look you, the stars shine still'

Please don't think I have The Duchess of Malfi, at my fingertips because I don't, but that was quoted in a book I read last year, Molly Fox's Birthday by Irish author Deirdre Madden, and it's stuck in my mind.
However I was a bit pleased with myself and kept dashing to the footnotes thinking I'd been really clever to pick up a Joycean reference to something obscure, only to find that I seem to be on my own with that connection.
Heading on into Cyclops, feeling slightly one-eyed and mystified, how pleased I was to be able to say I've been there when the reading of the obituaries mentioned Barnfield Crescent in Exeter and I've probably been driven past 179 Clapham Road, Stockwell on many an occasion.
How odd that something like that draws you back into a book and much to laugh at alongside James Joyce and Sylvia Beach, especially the list of those Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity engraved on the seastone girdle 'which dangled at every movement of his portentous frame'...William Tell, Thomas Cook & Son and the Last of the Mohicans suddenly making an appearance and lest we forget, the Queen of Sheba, and Lady Godiva.
I'm also getting a sense of other people's unfavourable opinions about Leopold Bloom and also wondering when Stephen will really come to life, he seems like a minor and rather undeveloped character thus far.
I keep thinking back to Declan Kiberd's reference to his Dublin-born father's love of Ulysses, parts known by heart, parts glossed over and wondering which they were and for this month I'm trying yet another new schedule, the book is sitting on my desk and I will read a few pages each day.
Time for Joan's thermos of comfort soup now I think but don't miss Lisa's fantastic in-depth Team Ulysses thoughts over at ANZ Litlovers Litblog and please let's hear news of how you are all doing, the suspense is killing me....
Simon S is that you waving at us from the peak of Mount Garnet Vickers?
Ellinchador did you make a dent in it?
KevinfromCanada still with us?
Cheryl are you still have those trudging pages with moments of joy? I am!
Lisa have you sent the spouse away again?
Lauren, Curzon and Lesley Ann are you still there pitching the tents ahead of us and cooking up a feast?
Lesley have you got your breath back and stayed with us?
Erika, could you pass those chocolate biscuits around?
Novel Insights and Knitting Out Loud can you hear me...are you still there?
Caroline, have you given up your footnote tendency and has Declan Kiberd helped? Declan has been my best friend this month.
ss are you still doing the listening version and swimming gently rather than climbing strenuosly?
Sandpiper, did you ditch that bookmark?
Jean, any more unexpected crevasses to distract or are you bivouacked here at Camp Five already?
Do you all realise that by Camp Six we will have passed the halfway point?
How amazing is that?