How To Be A (kind of) Woman

I'm not the biggest Caitlin Moran fan in the world, this is born mostly out of jealously; she always reminded me of that girl you went to school with, you know, you went to her house for tea a couple of times, and she was nice and everything, but wasn't you, and you find her fifteen years later on faceache and she's somehow phenomenally successful, and married, and owns her own home, and is pregnant, the bitch, whilst your counting down the twelve days till payday, living in rented hell and eating whatever got Whoopsed that week.

She is, however, very very funny, and current, and it therefore may come as some surprise that I only read the talk-of-the-twitter-summer-best-seller How To Be A Woman this week. These are for two reasons a)The above named jealously issue prevents me from getting behind any bandwagon that supports a woman twenty times more successful than I shall ever hope to be without my coming out in HIVES and b)I was, rather egotistically, awaiting my review copy.
In the end, however, I found the book in my good friend and fellow Tudor feminist admirer R's bathroom, and promptly nicked it. And I'm very glad I did.

It took me two days, on the bus, though I have to admit skimming vast chunks (the bit on fashion especially as it was in no way Relevant To My Interests-I'm the sort of person who thinks £25 for a handbag is excessive; the handbag I'm currently using I rescued from a mate's charity shop clear out, and my 'going out' handbag cost me £15.99 in TXMaxx in 2002.) Parts I found extraordinary-the chapters on giving birth and abortion were poignant and heart wrenching, I found myself nodding my head in agreement especially to her assertion there is an 'abortion hierarchy'-I can't be the only pro-choice campaigner sick of other's constantly pulling out the 'would you make a woman that was raped continue the pregnancy' argument; it's not about 'Good Abortion/Bad Abortion' it's about everyone having autonomy over their own body.
The book also made me laugh out loud-so much so at the 'lovely pie' bit that I might have nearly wee'd on the bus. Her humour isn't subtle, being based mostly on how many words you can think of for vagina, but it is raw, and, when mixed in with a very honest appraisal of the world she lives in, punches you in the gut so you have no option but to laugh very, very loudly.

However...

Parts of this book made me want to throw it at a wall in a way not seen since The Thorn Birds incident last spring. I have no idea how tall she is, but I am now as heavy as Moran was as a teen and also grew up amongst fat people* (though apparently I'm not allowed to call myself fat on the Internet any more as it upsets people. Never mind what my doctor, the woman at the gym and TopShop tell me, I'm not fat, I can't be fat, because I am attractive (apparently). Never mind how incredibly insulting that is to other people, or that it's my body, and I can call it any name I like, I must embrace my loveliness and refer to the extra four points on my BMI as curves...) and I would never, ever, say that fat people don't look human, or that a size 14 woman wearing heels' legs looked like a pig's ending in a point even if I lost weight.

Also, the thing about fat people not talking about binge eating is bollocks. Jesus, some of my friends and I have had competitions! We constantly compare notes on what we are eating, or what we have eaten, that week. My first year at uni, when I went a bit silly and got down to a size ten, resulting in my looking at 18 like Meryl Streep does now, my mother and I had to resort to talking about our feelings because I was no longer eating and we couldn't talk about food. In short; no more levitating parties in the clouds for you, Moran.

This is my main problem with the book; it is based entirely on Moran's experiences, and world view, which is fine as it is after all a memoir. But her style of lauding it up about feminism (her definition of which I also consider bollocks-you're not a feminist if you believe in equality, you're a feminist if you believe in the patriarchy. If everyone who believed in equality was a feminist, the world would have toilet cubicles more than three foot wide, we'd have Yvette Cooper as leader of the opposition already, and there would be no need for the #diversityaudit) makes the whole book preachy, and this I didn't like.

The best thing about the book is her sister, Caz. I spent last night writing a fanfic sitcom called "Wide Open Spaces" in my head, where Caz and Sharon from Bridget Jones meet each other in some hilarious circumstance and decide to run away together to start a ranch in Texas, with a Dixie Chicks soundtrack. Along with a decent film version of Persuasion and the biography of Mary Wollstonecraft being put on the small screen (with a British actress playing Mary. I am available and looks scarily like her...) this is a project that I'm putting on a back burner for now...
The book isn't really written for me (though I suspect that I'm it's target market, as I appear to be for most things these days. Damn you late twenties and your single-girl-who-isn't-looking-to-buy-a-house-yet-but-does-have-steady-work proof recession!) because I already am a feminist. I've read Greer, but I've also read Banyard, Redfearn, Walters and French. If you're just starting out on the path to liberation, then I'd give it a go. If you too have read the above named writers and think they're bollocks, avoid this book like cholera, it will make you angrier than you've ever been.

Be warned though; this isn't an instruction manual for anyone but middle class cis straight woman who occasionally fancy other women but only when they're Lady GaGa, who have Money and Stuff now, but didn't before, and live a fairly straight existence apart from drinking too much these days, and still think Courtney Love was cool. Oh God, it really is marketed for me isn't it? Oh God, I'd better go and DRINK SOUTHERN COMFORT FROM A WINE GLASS!!!!



*(not my sister, before she reads this and gets a complex)

It's Book Club Jim... Just Not As We Know It

I can't tell you the number of times I've heard the following:

'In a book club? I'd love to be in a book club, but I read too slowly'   

or

'I've always wanted to but I can't commit to a book a month'

This made the elves at LeedsBookClub sad, as though there was nothing worse in the world than not being able to share your love of books with other like-minded souls.

(We appreciate that there are, in fact, worse things in the world that this. Well, *most* of us do...)

So the wheels started turning and an idea slowly started to take root.


What about a book club on a slightly longer scale?

Perhaps every three months?

And so #LBC3reads was born!!!

The idea is a book club with all the usual components held once every three months to allow for the ultra-busy & /or slower reader to join in!

If people are interested, I'll organise the first meeting for mid-January 2012; we'll agree on a book and arrange the next meeting for the end of March!

Heck, if that's STILL too often for people; I'm totally happy to organise an LBC for once every six months!

Please let me know what you're thinking by either tweeting me @LeedsBookClub, commenting below or emailing me at leedsbookclub@gmail.com

Canongate Book 6 - Where Three Roads Meet

Yes, you're right, this is the wrong font...
Don't worry! We don't want to confuse you even more!! This is BookElf! AR has very kindly allowed me in on her Canongate Challenge, as Salley Vickers is one of my favourite writers, so I'm barging in here and reviewing her interpretation of the Oedipus myth.

Background to the Myth - Oedipus

Laius, King of Thebes, visits the oracle at Delphi who tells him that any son born to him shall kill him. When his wife Jocasta bears him a son, he pins his ankle together so he cannot crawl and they abandon him on a mountain side. However, the servant sent to leave the baby instead gives him to a shepherd to look after. Eventually the baby is adopted by the King and Queen of Corinth, who have no children of their own, and is named Oedipus. When he is grown, Oedipus hears rumours that he adopted and goes to ask the oracle, who tells his he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Oedipus flees Corinth and the people he presumes are his real parents, and travels to Thebes. On the way he meets Laius, with whom he argues and kills in self defence, not knowing this is his natural father.
When he arrives in Thebes Oedipus defeats the Sphinx, a beast part woman, part lion, who asks all travellers the riddle 'what travels on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night', eating anyone who gets it wrong. Oedipus solves the riddle, and the Sphinx throws herself over a cliff. The grateful people of Thebes, who have no idea who Oedipus is, appoint him their king, and marry him to the widowed Jocasta. Many years later, when Jocasta and Oedipus have had many children and a happy life together, a plague comes to Thebes. Creon, Jocasta's brother, is sent to the oracle, who says that Laius' killer must be banished before the pestilence can leave the people. The blind prophet Tiresias is sent for, and reluctantly reveals that Oedipus is the killer. Then a messenger appears to tell of the death of the King of Corinth. Oedipus is momentarily relieved that the prophecy he will kill his father has not come true, when the messenger reveals that Oedipus is adopted. Jocasta, realising that Oedipus is her son, hangs herself.
After consulting with the shepherd who was charged to abandon him as a baby, Oedipus realises he has killed his father and marries his mother. He blinds himself with a pin from Jocasta's dress and spends the rest of his days wandering Greece, guided by his faithful daughter Antigone.

*****

The Review

*****SPOILERS***
*****SPOILERS***

*****SPOILERS***

Now me with my classical background know Oedipus through the play Antigone, which I was forced to do at school (awful thing), but of course the name is more familiar to modern audiences as a complex, named by Freud for the 'unnatural' longings of a man for his mother and subsequent hatred of his father. Whether or not you think this is bollocks is up to you, but it makes a good story, and this is what Vickers has used; bringing the myth back to being just that. It is 1939 and Freud is lying on his death bed, suffering from the cancer of the mouth that has plagued him for nearly twenty years. He is visited by a strange shadowy figure, sometimes speaking Greek, sometimes English, who tells him, over the last months of his life, the story of Oedipus. This figure is revealed to be Tiresias, the prophet, who reveals his own life story alongside that of his master.

The language is stripped bear, and plods along, much like a Greek tragedy (can you tell how much I loved doing Greek at school?) and the myth that Tiresias tells isn't so very different from the original; this isn't a re-telling, just a telling. That, though,is what Vickers does so well; by reclaiming the myth as a story from Freud the usurper who is so successful in skimming the plot that the metaphor becomes more famous than myth.

I really really wish I hadn't read the introduction to this novella that explains the history of Freud's exile from Europe and his subsequent illness as this is the book's main flaw; it utterly fails to show, not tell. By being a dialogue between Freud and Tiresias all subtlety in introducing Freud's deathbed status is lost-what could have been a evoking tale of a man nearing death and learning from his mistakes becomes instead an almost homage to the myth and it's history, with nothing really changed or brought forward into modern time. This again fits with the Greek, but isn't very exciting to the reader. It also feels a little like Vickers is trying to show that the myth is ancient in origin and that should be respected, but it wasn't at all a fun way of bringing new readers to old tales.

I was, to be honest, bitterly disappointed by this book. Vickers usually takes her inspiration from great pieces of art, the inside front covers of her earlier novels show their inspiration so I thought the idea of re-telling a myth would suit her. But this instance the idea is better than the execution and whilst I still love her writing, I wouldn't be recommending this one.

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Canongate

Book 08 - Weight - Jeanette Winterson
Book 07 - Ragnarok - AS Byatt
Book 06 - Where Three Roads Meet
Book 05 - Dream Angus - Alexander McCall-Smith

Book 04 - The Helmet of Horror - Victor Pelevin

Book 03 - Binu and the Great Wall - Su Tong

Book 02 - Girl Meets Boy - Ali Smith

Book 01 - The Penelopiad - Margaret Atwood

Book List

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Ongoing Challenges - Table of Contents

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Full Table of Contents 

Leaving Certificate Poetry - Eavan Boland

A long long time ago (I can still remember...*ahem*) I had to study a number of poems for my Leaving Certificate (read A Level equivalents) examinations. Up until this point; I had enjoyed poetry but rarely read it for fun, preferring somewhat easier and more accessible fiction (utterly buying into the myth that poetry was somehow hard, irrelevant or distant  from everyday life).

These were my first contemporary poems and poets. The selection were electrifying and these poems - combined with a passionate and enthusiastic teacher - awoke something within me. It's a wonderful moment when a person realises that you don't have to 'get' poetry to love it. Just knowing that every experience can be both a unique and shared one is a powerful thing.

Eavan Boland was one of the triumvirate of 'Irish' poets that we studied. 
Born in Dublin in 1944; at the age of six she moved to London with her family, encountering vehement anti-Irish racism. This experience only intensified her sense of identity (as a proud Irish woman); a theme that she frequently returns to in her writing.

Returning to Ireland to complete her education; Boland was published by the age of twenty. She is a composer who reveals in the details of everyday life - finding the magic within the mundane - and uses everything from politics and history to her life as a mother and a wife to inform her writings.

She currently divides her time between Dublin and Palo Alto.

Child Of Our Time - Justice for the Forgotten

Yesterday I knew no lullaby
But you have taught me overnight to order
This song, which takes from your final cry
Its tune, from your unreasoned end its reason;
Its rhythm from the discord of your murder,
Its motive from the fact you cannot listen.

We who should have known how to instruct
With rhymes for your waking, rhythms for your sleep
Names for the animals you took to bed,
Tales to distract, legends to protect,
Later an idiom for you to keep
And living, learn, must learn from you, dead.

To make our broken images rebuild
Themselves around your limbs, your broken
Image, find for your sake whose life our idle
Talk has cost, a new language. Child
Of our time, our times have robbed your cradle.
Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken. 

The Pomegranate

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere.  And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted.  Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
                    It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate!  How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and 
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry.  I could warn her.  There is still a chance.
The rain is cold.  The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world.  But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.  
She will enter it.  As I have.
She will wake up.  She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips.  I will say nothing.

The Shadow Doll 

(This was sent to the bride-to-be in Victorian times, by her dressmaker. It consisted of a porcelain doll, under a dome of glass, modeling the proposed wedding dress.)

They stitched blooms from ivory tulle
to hem the oyster gleam of the veil.
They made hoops for the crinoline.

Now, in summary and neatly sewn --
a porcelain bride in an airless glamour --
the shadow doll survives its occasion.

Under glass, under wraps, it stays
even now, after all, discreet about
visits, fevers, quickenings and lusts

and just how, when she looked at
the shell-tone spray of seed pearls,
the bisque features, she could see herself

inside it all, holding less than real
stephanotis, rose petals, never feeling
satin rise and fall with the vows

I kept repeating on the night before --
astray among the cards and wedding gifts --
the coffee pots and the clocks and

the battered tan case full of cotton
lace and tissue paper, pressing down, then
pressing down again. And then, locks.

The War Horse

This dry night, nothing unusual   

About the clip, clop, casual

Iron of his shoes as he stamps death

Like a mint on the innocent coinage of earth.

I lift the window, watch the ambling feather

Of hock and fetlock, loosed from its daily tether

In the tinker camp on the Enniskerry Road,   

Pass, his breath hissing, his snuffling head

Down. He is gone. No great harm is done.   

Only a leaf of our laurel hedge is torn—

Of distant interest like a maimed limb,   

Only a rose which now will never climb

The stone of our house, expendable, a mere   

Line of defence against him, a volunteer

You might say, only a crocus, its bulbous head   

Blown from growth, one of the screamless dead.

But we, we are safe, our unformed fear

Of fierce commitment gone; why should we care

If a rose, a hedge, a crocus are uprooted   

Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated?

He stumbles on like a rumour of war, huge   

Threatening. Neighbours use the subterfuge

Of curtains. He stumbles down our short street   

Thankfully passing us. I pause, wait,

Then to breathe relief lean on the sill   

And for a second only my blood is still 

1972

The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me

It was the first gift he ever gave her,
buying it for five five francs in the Galeries
in pre-war Paris. It was stifling.
A starless drought made the nights stormy.

They stayed in the city for the summer.
The met in cafes. She was always early.
He was late. That evening he was later.
They wrapped the fan. He looked at his watch.

She looked down the Boulevard des Capucines.
She ordered more coffee. She stood up.
The streets were emptying. The heat was killing.
She thought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.

These are wild roses, appliqued on silk by hand,
darkly picked, stitched boldly, quickly.
The rest is tortoiseshell and has the reticent clear patience
of its element. It is
a worn-out, underwater bullion and it keeps,
even now, an inference of its violation.
The lace is overcast as if the weather
it opened for and offset had entered it.

The past is an empty cafe terrace.
An airless dusk before thunder. A man running.
And no way to know what happened then—
none at all—unless ,of course, you improvise:

The blackbird on this first sultry morning,
in summer, finding buds, worms, fruit,
feels the heat. Suddenly she puts out her wing—
the whole, full, flirtatious span of it.

The actual lace fan gift

1986

Love

Dark falls on this mid-western town
where we once lived when myths collided.
Dusk has hidden the bridge in the river
which slides and deepens
to become the water
the hero crossed on his way to hell.

Not far from here is our old apartment.
We had a kitchen and an Amish table.
We had a view. And we discovered there
love had the feather and muscle of wings
and had come to live with us,
a brother of fire and air.
We had two infant children one of whom
was touched by death in this town
and spared: and when the hero
was hailed by his comrades in hell
their mouths opened and their voices failed and
there is no knowing what they would have asked
about a life they had shared and lost.

I am your wife.
It was years ago.
Our child was healed. We love each other still.
Across our day-to-day and ordinary distances
we speak plainly. We hear each other clearly.

And yet I want to return to you
on the bridge of the Iowa river as you were,
with snow on the shoulders of your coat
and a car passing with its headlights on:

I see you as a hero in a text —
the image blazing and the edges gilded —
and I long to cry out the epic question
my dear companion:
Will we ever live so intensely again?
Will love come to us again and be
so formidable at rest it offered us ascension
even to look at him?

But the words are shadows and you cannot hear me.
You walk away and I cannot follow 
 

* * * * *

School Days Over

Leaving Certificate Poetry

• Eavan Boland
• William Shakespeare
• Michael Longley
• John Keats
• Seamus Heaney
• Elizabeth Bishop

GCSE Poetry - T'Elf

If I Have To Leave - D.E. Barrell

Natalie Williams

A Level Poetry 

• Utter Filth

O Level Poetry

• They Walked and Talked - Uche Okeke

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School Days Over Table of Contents 

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Full Table of Contents 

The Hunger Games Podcast - Book 1

Please find attached the latest LeedsBookClub podcast!!

Joined by twitter biuddy J, we take a more detailed look at the first book of the trilogy that's had me raving about it for...well... it must be weeks now!

Expect major spoilers for the book and a quick natter about the upcoming film too!!

***LANGUAGE WARNING ***

- We're actually very restrained. In fact, this probably comes the closest to not needing a language warning!

***SPOILERS WARNING ***

- We DISCUSS the books, in detail. To be honest, not expecting spoilers sort of seems to miss the point of the podcast...but, there you go, consider your self warned...

The Hunger Games Book 1

Mobile Link THG 1

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The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games - Book 1 - The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games - Book 1 - Podcast

The Hunger Games - Book 2 - Catching Fire

The Hunger Games - Book 3 - Mockingjay

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