Thoughts from the Bus Stop

Quentin Blake: Frabjous Beasts

A frabjous beast, by Quentin Blake

The wonderful Quentin Blake has curated an exhibition at The Holburne Museum of Art in Bath. Frabjous Beasts is on till 10 September 2006.

"Quentin Blake has selected twenty beastly works by some of the country’s finest living illustrators. Sara Fanelli presents us with some wonderfully monstrous images from Greek mythology, Emma Chichester Clark provides strange creatures to accompany Roald Dahl’s songs and verse, Axel Scheffler’s Gruffalo makes an appearance as does Raymond Briggs’ Fungus the Bogeyman." (Via www.bath.ac.uk/holburne)

From The Kershaw Pictures by Quentin Blake, part of the Nightingale Project

Fantastic Mr Blake has also produced a series of pictures for the walls of Kershaw Ward, a ward for older adults at South Kensington and Chelsea Mental Health Centre.

"The ward environment has now been transformed with the installation of a series of sixteen pictures – some of them as much as eight feet long – showing scenes of people of his own generation enjoying themselves in a world of Quentin's characteristic wit and optimism. The patients on the ward have been describing the pictures as 'an absolute joy!' or saying 'they make me smile'!

The works in the ward are enlarged facsimile prints from the artist's originals, which also allows them to be used in other hospitals. An exhibition at the Mental Health Centre (will) run until 8th September... Opening hours and other details of the exhibition are to be found on www.nightingaleproject.org." (Via quentinblake.com)

Also:
The Nightingale Project: Quentin Blake's pictures transform mental health ward
Bookmark - books and disability issues: The Quentin Blake Award gives children a voice
The Guardian, December 20, 2005: Children's author of the month: Quentin Blake
Quentin Blake Europe School, Germany
Toonhound: Gentleman Briggs - A Raymond Briggs fansite
The Guardian, December 20, 2005: Bloomin' Christmas

Jasper Fforde, Thursday Next and Pickwick the Dodo

A cuddly dodo, yesterday (c) Kristen Bailey

This is Pickwick, a dodo. She's a birthday pressie for Sarah, to whom I recently introduced the Thursday Next series of fantasy novels by Jasper Fforde. Thursday is a literary detective who lives in a parallel world which is pretty similar to ours but with some notable exceptions.

Books are so important to everyone that they are the subject of organised crime, fraud and extortion. Come Saturday night, there are city centre fights between opposing gangs - those who reckon Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, and those who credit Marlowe. It's 1985 but The Crimean War is still going, Wales is a socialist republic, croquet is the national sport and technology allows for extinct species to be cloned - hence Thursday's pet dodo, Pickwick.

I mentioned in a previous post that I'd heard about a book called The Eyre Affair, where characters jumped into the classic Jane Eyre (possibly my all-time favourite book) and messed about with the plot. I was intrigued and got hold of a copy - and absolutely loved it. It's incredibly funny, gripping and full of clever ideas, skewed logic and bad literary puns.

The other books in the series - Lost In A Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten - are all fantastic. Inside the BookWorld, characters from books amuse themselves however they like whilst not needed for the narrative (Marianne Dashwood has a fag break, Rochester shows Japanese tourists around Thornfield).

BookWorld is policed by Jurisfiction, whose many duties include catching PageRunners (characters who have got bored of their own book and run off to something more exciting) and running group anger management sessions for the cast of Wuthering Heights (faciliated by Jurisfiction operative Miss Havisham). Unpublished books languish in the Well of Lost Plots, constantly at risk of being broken up for Text.

Jasper Fforde's other novels, The Big Over Easy and his new release, The Fourth Bear (details here) are the first two in the Nursery Crime series. Those are still in my 'To Read' pile for when I've finished Something Rotten. A new Thursday Next book, The War of the Words, is due in July 2007.

Sarah (a librarian) and I met Jasper Fforde last night at his reading/signing for The Fourth Bear at Waterstones in Brighton and he's a Thoroughly Bluddy Nice Chap. S showed him her new dodo. I'd got it by mail order from the gift shop of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (and accessorised with it with a name tag) - and Jasper said that he'd got the idea for cloned dodos from visiting that same museum years ago. Curiouser and curiouser...

Jasper's endlessly amusing official website is: www.jasperfforde.com

Independent: The Fourth Bear By Jasper Fforde
Wikipedia: Jasper Fforde
Writers Write: A Conversation With Jasper Fforde
January Magazine: Interview: Jasper Fforde
The Zone: Interview: Jasper Fforde
BBC Wiltshire: Jasper Fforde's alternative Swindon
British Council (Poland, 7th October 2005): Interview - Jasper Fforde

Jane Eyre: online and searchable

'..."I tell you I must go!" I retorted, roused to something like passion. "Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?--a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!--I have as much soul as you,--and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;--it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,--as we are!"

"As we are!" repeated Mr. Rochester--"so," he added, enclosing me in his arms. Gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips: "so, Jane!"

...But what had befallen the night? The moon was not yet set, and we were all in shadow...'

Got lost in Jane Eyre again - the proposal scene this time - via the ReadPrint site, which offers thousands of classic books online, unabridged and searchable, free and without registration. Mmmmm...

Janet and Allan Ahlberg: What's in the Book?

Burglar Bill and The Jolly Postman by Janet and Allan Ahlberg

Seven Stories, The Centre for Children's Books in Newcastle, is running What's In The Book?, an exhibition about the books of Janet and Allan Ahlberg:

"He did the words, she did the pictures. Together they made the whole book, cover to cover. Like tennis players they battered (sic) the words and pictures back and forth between them till the game was over, the book finished. And when one was done, they began another; 37 books in 20 years.

What's in the Book? celebrates the Alhberg's creative partnership and explores the wonderful books they made. Discover where they got their ideas and how they turned them into highly original books that are clever, funny and have massive appeal to both children and adults.

Rub shoulders with classic characters like Burglar Bill and Mrs Wobble the Waitress. See beautiful original illustrations from favourites like Each Peach Pear Plum and Peepo. Listen to poems and rhymes. Write letters for The Jolly Postman. Share Ha Ha Bonk jokes and tell your own. Win a prize and enjoy sharing Janet and Allan's best loved books."

Burglar Bill was the first book I really loved, at about 4 years old. It's a great story and I was engrossed by the intricate detail in Janet's illustrations. Last year I bought it for my friends' daughter for her third birthday. Turns out she loves it too: "...'That's a nice tin of beans,' says Burglar Bill. 'I'll have that!'..."

What's in the Book? is on until January 2007.

Penguin: Janet and Allan Ahlberg
Children's Poetry Archive: Allan Ahlberg (inc interview)
Amazon.co.uk: Janet's Last Book

Lisa Jewell: new book on the way!

News just in - well, I'm pleased even it is a 10-month wait:

"... So, I can now tell you officially that it's called Learning to Fly, and it will be out in hardback in January 2007. Sorry, I know I said it would probably be out this summer, but it's only a few more months to wait... For those of you who missed my last diary entry, here's some blurb about the book:

'Toby's House is beautiful. Or at least it would be if it wasn't falling down and full of free-loading strangers. So when his long-lost father suddenly announces that he's coming back to England and wants to see how his only son is doing as he approaches his 40th birthday, Toby realises it's time to sort out not just his house, but also his life.'..."

Mr Beck's Underground Map

Harry Beck's 1933 design for the London Underground Map (c) Transport for London

I've had a few maps links building up for a while and Dave has prompted me to get on and post them by urging his readers to vote for Harry Beck's London Underground Map, which has made it into the top 3 of the BBC's Great British Design Quest. The
Transport for London site offers the tube map in many translations. And ooh, look - you can get a London Underground Map mouse mat from London's Transport Museum!

I have a lovely book about the map's development - Mr Beck's Underground Map by Ken Garland. I see there is now a 'sequel' - Underground Maps After Beck by Maxwell J. Roberts. Then there are Mark Ovenden's Metro Maps of the World books (1 and 2).

Elsewhere, 30gms is disappointed by an attempt by The Guardian's Dorian Lynskey to chart the branches and connections of 100 years of music using the London Underground map (pdf of that map here), and links to Geofftech's Tube Map Variations and Spin-Offs. Boing Boing posts about anagram transit maps, and has examples for Miami, Dublin, Ontario, Dallas, Glasgow, Portland, Ottawa and Houston.

Check out the amazing map of the Moscow subway - brought to my attention by the BBC's Map Man telly programme. Further Googling has turned up maps for Sydney, Glasgow ('The Clockwork Orange') and Helsinki.

And of course, I can't finish without mentioning a favourite reworking of Harry Beck's tube map - Simon Patterson's The Great Bear.

"I am a very stylish girl."

This is a great picture of Roald Dahl's first wife, actress Patricia Neal, spotted in a selection of Dahl's photographs on the BBC website.

It wasn't till I watched a documentary about him which she took part in that I recognised her, purely by her distinctive voice, as George Peppard's mistress in Breakfast at Tiffany's (one of my favourite films, d'oh!).

Geisha and Kanzashi

Tsumami kanzashi flowers, made by Naomi Graham-Diaz (c) PuchiMaiko.com

I love it when a chance 'click' sends me off on a journey round the net. Reading comments on the blog of a friend of a friend, I came across these beautiful tsumami kanzashi flowers, made by Naomi Graham-Diaz, who sells them on her PuchiMaiko site, and also runs Immortal Geisha, a fantastic info site about geisha and maiko (trainee geisha) culture and dress.

Kanzashi are hair ornaments used in traditional Japanese hairstyles, and the word 'tsumami' means 'to pinch'. These flowers are traditionally made by pinching a small, square-cut piece of cloth, usually fine silk, into bud and petal forms. This Japanese kanzashi site has dozens of breathtaking examples for sale - click on some of the thumbtails and be stunned! Then have a look at Gaijin Geisha's kanzashi, which are a gorgeous modern spin on traditional design.

I really want to learn how to make some - but I bet it's a fiddly business to get right. Apparently they are glued not sewn. Craftster links to a series of kanzashi demo movies which are fascinating. The speed and accuracy with which they work is amazing.

I've decided I want to get two books - an illustrated, factual guide to geisha life - maybe Geisha: A Unique World of Tradition, Elegance and Art, by John Gallagher; and a decent biography of a geisha. I read a little of Geisha of Gion last year when I was doing a History of Costume course and we read the passages about how the maikos and geishas dress. It's the autobiography of Mineko Iwasaki, whose life story was also the subject of Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha (probably the best known of the recent batch of geisha novels and biogs). Geisha by Liza Dalby is supposed to be very good too - her story of how she (an American graduate student in anthropology) became a geisha.

It's lovely to have a new interest! Well, not new exactly - I've always been attracted to Japanese and Chinese decorative art and clothing, but in a very vague, ill-informed way. 'Chinoiserie', I suppose - that mixed-up British perception of what Japanese and Chinese style is (like the interior decor in Brighton's glorious Royal Pavilion, for example). So the enthusiasm is there but not the knowledge - it will be exciting to delve deeper and learn a lot more about it, through reading and by trying to learn some new practical techniques.

***

PuchiMaiko
Immortal Geisha
Wikipedia: Memoirs of a Geisha (book and forthcoming film)
Victoria & Albert Museum, London: Chinoiserie
Wikipedia: Chinoiserie

Reader, I...

...went to see an adaptation of Jane Eyre at the Theatre Royal, Brighton last week. I'm very glad I got to see it - Jane Eyre has been my favourite book since I was a kid and I've never seen it on the stage before - but I can't say I was impressed. Obviously the story had to be abridged, and of course I wasn't expected a whole variety of sets to cover the different places Jane lives in the book, but... it was a bit of a damp squib.

The whole thing took place in one room in Thornfield, important chunks of the story were explained away in a couple of lines of dialogue, it sped along far too fast (the plot should simmer slooooowly), and Peter Amory (Chris Tate from Emmerdale) as Rochester really wasn't very convincing. There were moments of greatness - mainly when one of Charlotte Brontë's original lines was delivered with spirit as part of the dialogue - but I kept being distracted by what was lacking.

Am currently trying to read (I say trying - I've started reading about six books at once, which means I'm making little progress with any of them) Lyndall Gordon's biography, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life. So far it's a bit dry and wordy, am hoping it'll pick up a bit of speed.

I first got into Jane Eyre when I was eight and took the audiobook (read by Dame Wendy Hiller) out of the library - Rochester was my first crush! I borrowed those tapes so many times my Mum threatened to ban them from the house. So I read the book, and I've read it every couple of years since then.

Am interested in getting hold of The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde - a fantasy novel based of the story of Jane Eyre, where characters have the power to go into classic books and interact with the characters. And I should re-read Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys' prequel to Jane Eyre, about the early life of Rochester's first wife, Bertha Mason, who becomes 'the mad woman in the attic'.

There are many other filmed versions of Jane Eyre I've yet to see. There's one starring Samantha Morton and Ciarán Hinds, an older BBC version with Zelah Clarke and Timothy Dalton (although this may be the series I remember watching on Sunday teatimes when I was a kid, it's just that he's not the Rochester I remember - he had black hair), a 1970 version with Susannah York and George C. Scott, the 1943 film starring Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles, and a low-budget 1934 film starring Virginia Bruce and Colin Clive. I got the DVD of Franco Zefirelli's Jane Eyre (with William Hurt and Charlotte Gainsbourg) for my birthday, and I watched it drinking green tea from my Jane Eyre mug. Both were spot-on.

The Scotsman: Jane Eyre, Theatre Royal, Glasgow
Ureader: Peter Amory in Jane Eyre - A Review
Wikipedia: Jane Eyre
TimothyDalton.com: In Search of Thornfield Hall

Reader, I shagged him

Tanya Gold, The Guardian:

"Elizabeth Gaskell is a literary criminal, who, in 1857, perpetrated a heinous act of grave-robbing. Gaskell took Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre, the dirtiest, darkest, most depraved fantasy of all time, and, like an angel murdering a succubus, trod on her. In a "biography" called The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published just two years after the author's death, Gaskell stripped Charlotte of her genius and transformed her into a sexless, death-stalked saint...(continues)..."

24 Hour Museum: Brontë Parsonage Museum To Hold Minute's Silence For Charlotte