Kh'bin oysgeforn felder un velder

[sovay]

Most of this week went toward construction—I was going to write that the kitchen has finally begun to look like a functional room rather than an art installation, but I think it is always going to look like a little of both—with some time off for good behavior, but there are now some genuinely bad things happening in my extended family and I am not sure how much I feel like posting substantively. I made chicken coconut soup for dinner with lemongrass, galangal, and kaffir lime leaves; I had to leave out the fish sauce so that my father could eat it. On the basis of its first episode, I am ready to declare Slings & Arrows (2003—2006) some of the best television I have ever seen. Remind me about A.S. Byatt. Here are some songs I have recently discovered.

Patrick Wolf, "The Bachelor (feat. Eliza Carthy)"

I will never marry, marry at all
No one will wear my silver ring

Susan McKeown & Lorin Sklamberg, "Prayer for the Dead"

Oy, ver vet nokh mir kadish zogn?
Ver vet mayn likht nokhtrogn?

Who will say Kaddish for me?
Who will carry my light?

Peter Doherty, "Last of the English Roses"

She knows her Rodneys from her Stanleys
And her Kappas from her Reeboks
And her tit from her tat
And her Winstons from her Enochs

Tori Amos, "Starling"

Starling, when he screams
He screams in black and white
Just like the magpie

The first is purportedly Appalachian in origin, although I believe it belongs to one of cucumberseed's worlds; the second is a braiding of nineteenth-century Irish folk, twentieth-century Yiddish, and a macaronic prayer in eleventh-century Latin and Irish; the third, the internet tells me, is reworking Jean Genet's Notre Dame des Fleurs (1943). I can't explain the fourth in the least, but I like its language. Enjoy.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Byatt's an older female author from Yorkshire. She's written the Potter series, (The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman covering the life of a Yorkshire family from the fifties over the decades) The Game an interesting contemporary novel about sisters who have a Bronte-esque game and world and who grow up very differently, Possession about the nature of art and history, set in the 80s and the 1840s, a pile of short stuff, and The Children's Book about what you owe to art and what you owe to real people and the consequences of this, against in a kind of William Morris/Fabian background. She's a feminist, but her major concerns are to do with the proper and possible relationship between life and art, which makes her unusually interesting as it isn't something people have been concerned about much in this last century. I like her work a lot.

[eredien]

and The Children's Book about what you owe to art and what you owe to real people and the consequences of this, against in a kind of William Morris/Fabian background.

Ooh. A novel about exactly the problem I am wrestling with. When I am done with Possession that's going on my list.

[sovay]

Byatt's an older female author from Yorkshire.

I think the sentence should have read "Remind me to talk about A.S. Byatt"—I keep meaning to post about her work, which I have rediscovered since bouncing off Possession at Brandeis—but thank you for this summary! The Children's Book sounds very much like the one I want to read next.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yup. That too.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

I am reading The Children's Book and it is gorgeous so far.

What I love about Byatt (I've been reading her since The Virgin in the Garden) is her thingliness: drawer within drawer in each cabinet. She's the V&A between covers.

Nine