George Orwell’s Dessert Recipes

In a diary entry from March 5, 1936, which gave us 33-year-old Orwell’s contemplation of gender equality in work and housework, he writes down Mrs. Searle’s fruit loaf recipe to keep himself from losing it, noting parenthetically that it is “very good with butter.”

• 1 lb flour. 
• 1 egg. 
• 4 oz. treacle. 
• 4 oz. mixed fruit (or currants). 
• 8 oz. sugar.
  6 oz. margarine or lard. 

Cream the sugar and margarine, beat the egg and add it, add the treacle and then the flour, put in greased tins and bake about 1/2 to 3/4 hour in a moderate oven.

More at Brain Pickings

Bookshelf Pocket Watch

A beautiful Pocket Watch Locket Necklace
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Famous Writers’ Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized

A visualization of the correlation between writers’ wake-up times, displayed in clock-like fashion around each portrait, and their literary productivity, depicted as different-colored “auras” for each of the major awards and stack-bars for number of works published, color-coded for genre. The writers are ordered according to a “timeline” of earliest to latest wake-up times, beginning with Balzac’s insomniac 1 A.M. and ending with Bukowski’s bohemian noon.

More at Brain Pickings

Beautiful Ruins

This novel by Jess Walter attracted me because it opens on the Ligurian Coast of Italy, a lovely part of the world. Twenty something actress Dee Moray arrives at the Hotel Adequate View in Porto Vergogna, a lacklustre fishing village at the butt end of the spectacularly scenic Cinque Terre area. Hotel owner Pasquale Tursi has big dreams of turning the small village into a tourist destination and is building a clifftop tennis court by hand, hauling stones up the hill one by one. When young Pasquale sees Dee it is love at first sight. She has been working on the film Cleopatra which was being shot in Rome, she is dying, she is in love with actor Richard Burton who is in the film with her, she is waiting for him to join her in Porto Vergogna. So far so good.
Then we skip 50 years ahead to Hollywood, Edinburgh, Washington and Idaho and are introduced to a dizzying array of mostly forgettable characters and narrative threads - too many for a 340 page book. Walter writes like a runaway bus and, like an out of control vehicle, this novel is bound to crash. All the stories connect in the end but I couldn't keep the names of the characters or the story lines straight and had to keep flipping back. When I first saw the cover I was ready to take a pass on this book but read some positive reviews by reputable sources (NPR, NYT and others) and decided to give it a go.  Beautiful Ruins is proof that you can tell a book by its cover and I should have followed my initial instincts. It was a fluffy book about shallow people and I heaved a sigh of relief when I finished it. Plenty of people liked it. I didn't.

Virginia Woolf's Working Table

Virginia Woolf’s working table, photographed by Gisèle Freund (1965)
Via bizarre reverie

6-Way Conjoined Book

(Photo: National Library of Sweden)

This rare and complex is book owned by the National Library of Sweden. Erik Kwakkel, a medieval book historian at Leiden University, says that this book is actually six books that are each opened differently. Each book opens and closes with a little clasp.

Via Neatorama

A Poem by Howard Moss, Born Today in 1922

The light that hangs in the ailanthus weaves

The leaves’ leavetaking overtaking leaves.

The actual is real and not imagined,—still,

The eye, so learned in disenchantment, sees

Two trees at once, this one of summer’s will,

And winter’s one, when no bird will assail

The skyline’s hyaline transparencies,

Emptying its architecture by degrees.

Roundly in its fury, soon, the sun

Feverish with light, goes down, and on

Come ambitious stars—the stars that were

But this morning dimmed.

Somewhere a slow

Piano scales the summits of the air

And disappears, and dark descends, and though

The birds turn off their songs now light is gone,

The mind drowned in the dark may dream them on.



Paris Review 

Heart-wrenching quotes from Winnie the Pooh

“I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.”

 “One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.”

“Promise me you’ll never forget me because if I thought you would, I’d never leave.”

 “’How do you spell love?’ – Piglet
‘You don’t spell it…you feel it.’ – Pooh”

Link
Via Holy Kaw!

Kicking The Sky

Anthony De Sa's novel Kicking the Sky is about Toronto's loss of innocence and the coming of age of Antonio Rebelo. It is told in the voice of Antonio, an eleven year old growing up in the Little Portugal area of downtown Toronto in 1977. The story unfolds against the backdrop of the real murder of a twelve year old shoeshine boy named Emanuel Jaques on the seedy Yonge Street Strip. As a child welfare worker in that part of Toronto at the time I remember the incident well and the shockwaves it sent through the community. When Antonio and his friends heard the boy was missing they decided to form their own search party but Emanuel was found dead on the roof of the Charlie's Angels body rub parlour, murdered by homosexual pedophiles. A tsunami of homophobia swept over the Portuguese community and pressure was applied on the police to clear Yonge Street of the strip clubs, lewd book stores, massage parlours and the street hustlers who plied their trade there.

Antonio and his friends are left to their own devices because their parents work long hours at multiple menial jobs and cannot supervise them. A young man, James, moves into a garage on the back lane where Antonio, Ricky and Manny hang out. He befriends the trio and the boys use the garage as a sort of clubhouse. James convinces Antonio to smuggle food from his mother's kitchen and bring it to him. Manny steals bicycles for James. Ricky, a sweet boy whose only parent is a drunken, abusive lout, is pimped out to a neighbour by James. But James can also be kind to the boys and takes in a young girl who was impregnated by her stepfather. Is he a good person or a sexual predator?  Antonio finds himself both attracted to and repelled by James and is confused by these feelings. Events careen out of control and culminate in a rat's nest of an ending.

There is another story thread. Antonio sees a Jesus-like image on a shell when he is eating seafood. Shortly afterwards a shopkeeper claims that her arthritis was cured after touching Antonio's hand. His father sees an opportunity to take advantage of the situation and sets his son up with a red cape and the limpet shell in the family garage where he acts as a faith healer to the gullible. Antonio's father exploits him but eventually realizes it is wrong and ends the sideshow.

This look at the Toronto of 1977 is pitch perfect. It was a time when kids were still free to roam the city named "Toronto the Good". The Emanuel Jaques murder changed all that. When the book ends the boys have faced some harsh realities and are no longer happy-go-lucky kids riding through the laneways on their banana seat bicycles and the Jaques trial is wrapping up. Antonio joins the men to dig up a neighbour's fig tree. It is spring.
This is a dark novel that is very hard to get through but it captures a city, a community and an era. I am thoroughly glad to have read it.

A bit of a bonus: This book trailer uses footage from that time to illustrate the mood that emerged in the aftermath of the murder.

James Baldwin’s Paris

James Baldwin in 1962. Carl Mydans/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

"Having spent nearly a decade living in Paris, I’d eaten at Les Deux Magots many times. That afternoon, however, I had a specific purpose in mind. I was retracing James Baldwin’s steps through Paris, while asking myself where Baldwin might be living if he were in the city now. To further my search, I had invited the expatriate African-American novelist — and Baldwin enthusiast — Jake Lamar to join me at Les Deux Magots, hoping he would catch any gaps in my itinerary."

More at NYTimes.com

Dual Intersection Of Interests

One August evening in 1973, Raymond Carver heard a knock on the door of his faculty apartment at the famed Iowa Writer's Workshop in Iowa City. Standing in the threshold was an older man, holding an empty glass.
"Pardon me," the man said, "I'm John Cheever. Could I borrow some scotch?" Carver was right to immediately sense a "dual intersection of interests." 

— with Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

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The National Department of Poetry

Via The Curious Brain

16 Books To Read Before They Hit Theaters This Year

16 Books To Read Before They Hit Theaters This Year

Lessons from Montaigne, Godfather of Blogging

In How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (public library), British biographer and philosophy scholar Sarah Bakewell traces “how Montaigne has flowed through time via a sort of canal system of minds” and argues that some of the most prevalent hallmarks of our era — our compulsive immersion in various forms of lifestreaming, our incessant social sharing, our constant oscillation between introspection and extraversion as we observe our private experiences more closely than ever so we can record and frame them more perfectly in public — can be traced down to this one proto-blogger, the godfather of the essay as a genre.

Via Brain Pickings

Ten Who Left Us: Select Literary Obituaries from 2013

In 2013 we lost two Nobel laureates, a revered editor and teacher, plus writers of crime fiction, literary fiction, poetry, history, essays, biographies, screenplays, mega-bestsellers, movie criticism, and memoirs.

Read more at The Millions 

Real Estate of Edith Wharton’s ‘The Age of Innocence’

Lienau Collection/Avery Architectural Library

Real Estate of ‘The Age of Innocence’: Edith Wharton’s corpulent great-aunt Mary Mason Jones served as one of the most memorable inspirations in literary New York: the model for Mrs. Manson Mingott in Wharton’s novel “The Age of Innocence.”


above: Rowhouses built by Rebecca Jones stood on the east side of Fifth Avenue, from 55th to 56th Street, in 1870.
More at  NYTimes.com

Famous Authors’ Handwritten Outlines for Great Works of Literature – Flavorwire

Many authors plan out their works beforehand, in chart or list or scribble form, in order to keep everything straight. Flavorwire provides a fascinating peek into the creative process of various authors.

Joseph Heller’s chart outline for Catch-22.

Norman Mailer’s character timeline for Harlot’s Ghost.

J.K. Rowling’s spreadsheet plan for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

HARUKI MURAKAMI: A path for souls to travel

"As a Japanese author, I was stunned in no small measure by media reports that publications by Japanese authors have disappeared from many bookstores in China as the sovereignty row over the Senkaku Islands heats up. There are few details available now to determine if it is a boycott orchestrated by the Chinese government or a voluntary pullout by bookstores. So I want to refrain from giving my view on the appropriateness of the action for now."
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