Tales From the City- Oxford University Parks

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I was back in Oxford on a Bank Holiday. I always vow to never travel on Bank Holidays and yet here I was thrashing my way through the crowds. The line at the Thornton’s Ice Cream window was a mile … Continue reading →

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Write On- Googling the goggling…oh dear….

 

Once in a while, a word comes along that really jars you out of the read. I was really into this current novel that I am reading…when I read the following sentence.

She goggled.

What? Googled? That was my first thought and that just shows you how dominate that word has become in my  mindset. It was a short sentence to say the least, so no need to reread it. I had to go back and read the sentence before this one to get context and then jog the old brain cells.

Ah yes..goggled…goggles…eye glasses…expression archaic meaning more than likely… she stare wide-eyed.  Or, she stared with a wide-eyed look of surprise. Or, her eyes bulged with surprise…either way this character was surprised at something.

Okay, I thought, that word probably was in common usage when this story takes place…let it go and get back into the story…but another chapter later, and again, this character goggles, goggled, and goggled again. A very short concise way of expressing her astonishment, which I think used once would have sufficed, and the other times, well, perhaps there were a few other word choices available to this particular author. It  very well may be the correct usage for the word, but when it jars the reader out of the story on to the internet to google the meaning of goggle…you’ve broken that magic bridge and sent the reader crashing back to reality.

I had to fight Google to get the current meaning of goggle, as Google dominates the web searches for more than 25 pages. I don’t give up easily! So I Googled, goggle meaning of, and finally had some success. It was indeed what I thought it meant.

Curious choice of a word and if you are now seeing smoke? Well, that is  my spell checker who now has goggled at this post to the point of exasperation!

Have you come across odd words lately in your reads?

Doors- A very small alleyway door

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I do like poking my nose into all sorts of things. I had to go up this alleyway and see what the back of those fabulous Boston Brownstones were all about. I found this door and many others as the … Continue reading →

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Tales from the City- A lucky bath and a very disappointed lad.

Strange things happen in the city, I’m lucky that I have been spared quite a few of them. When the family lived in Primrose Hill, in London, the war was on. My father was only a young boy when he sat in the front room listening to the wireless…war had broken out. That night the air raid sirens went off,  my grandmother hurried the family into the bomb shelter at the bottom of the garden. My dad hated going into the shelter. All the action was happening outside and he was missing it. Whenever a bomb hit in the neighbour, the local boys would rush out and hunt  for bits of shrapnel they collected and traded. It was exciting times for a young lad, and naturally terrifying for anyone over the age of ten who understood the devastation of war.

WWII Unexploded Bomb London (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That night, to my father’s delight, the house took a direct hit. When they came out of the shelter, the roof was smoking and a great gap let in the night sky. He raced into the house, up the stairs as fast as he could. It was his room! The attic room! He flung open the door and through the smoke saw the best thing ever. An unexploded bomb in his bed! What fabulous luck! He was about to go and examine it when my grandmother, in near hysterics, grabbed him by the collar and drug him out of the house to safety. He never quite forgave that. He sulked the rest of the night and the next day, not really listening to the relentless lectures about safety and danger that the aunties and my grandmother were raining down on him. After all, it was rather a splendid find and so cruelly snatched out of his reach. Years later when he told the story, still chuckling, he was far wiser about war and how easily tragedy strikes.

I was reminded of his adventure when I read about a woman in London, who by all accounts was quite a local stunner. She had just slipped into the bath, and was just relaxing, when her house took a direct hit.  The house was destroyed. No one expected to find any survivors, but when rescue workers came to the scene, they found her with the bathtub over her like a giant iron shield. What a bath that was!

A  warm bathtub and an empty bed in London, both very lucky for their occupants, adding to the tales of a great city!

Write on- Writers- Life can’t ever really defeat a writer- Edna Ferber

Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death — fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant. –Edna Ferber

English: Photograph of Edna Ferber (1885-1968) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I came across this quote and fell in love with it, but I have to confess I have no idea who this writer was, or indeed what her writing was about. It turns out that the author of this quote was none other than the Pulitzer Prize winner, Edna Ferber. She was born 1885 in Kalamazoo Michigan, the daughter of Julia and Jacob Ferber, Hungarian Immigrants. Edna in her autobiography wrote of her pride in being Jewish and of the terrible anti-Semitism so common during her time. She writes of being invited to a High Society dinner party in New York. The women she was with didn’t know Ferber and apparently two of the other guests were Jewish. A woman boasted that whenever she discovered a book was written by a Jewish Writer, she threw it away into the garbage. Ferber and the two other Jewish Women, walked out. I like that…just from reading that little bit, I knew I liked this woman and had to find out more about her.

She started out her writing career working for various newspapers, but it was when she was recovering from an illness that fiction captured her. She quickly sold her first short story, and by 1912, her short stories were collected in volumes. It’s said that reviewers thought she was a man, pretending to be a woman, to cover up the fact that it was really a man writing…what a mindset in those days…only a proper man could write! Thankfully we have evolved somewhat since then.  Ferber apparently was really proud of this accusation, as she believed, as I do, that writers should be judged by the work, not their sex, and I would add fame. Their writing should always stand on its own merits.

Ferber was quite the writer, a playwright whose plays were turned into films. Two of which I have seen, Stage Door, and Show Boat. But still I hadn’t read any of her actual writing. She won her Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for her novel, SO BIG. It sold a massive 300,000 thousand copies! This in the day when the internet and social media wasn’t even a glimmer in someone’s eyes!  Not to be content with all that, she wrote two biographies, thirteen novels, endless short stories, and eight of her novels were made into films.

Edna died in April of 1968 of cancer. She was a strong woman, a woman ahead of her time, she’s been noted as saying, marriage was not part of her game plan. She gifted her writing to her country as she believed her writing encouraged women to become assertive so that they could have freedom and enjoy success in any part of their lives. Women were not destined to be housewives with no other options. She was an extraordinary woman, and I will have to hunt down one of her books and have a read.

Reviews : SO BIG

“A masterpiece. . . . It has the completeness, [the] finality, that grips and exalts and convinces.” — Literary Review

Widely regarded as the master work of celebrated author and Algonquin Round Table mainstay Edna Ferber—who also penned other classics including Show Boat, Giant, Ice Palace, Saratoga Trunk, and Cimarron—So Big is a rollicking panorama of Chicago’s high and low life at the turn of the 20th Century. Following the travails of gambler’s daughter Selina Peake DeJong as she struggles to maintain her dignity, her family, and her sanity in the face of monumental challenges, this is the stunning and unforgettable “novel to read and to remember” by an author who “critics of the 1920s and 1930s did not hesitate to call… the greatest American woman novelist of her day” (New York Times).

Quotes:

“Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never! ”

“Many earnest young writers with a flow of adjectives and a passion for detail have attempted to describe the quiet of a great city at night, when a few million people within it are sleeping, or ought to be. They work in the clang of a distant owl car, and the roar of an occasional “L” train, and the hollow echo of the footsteps of the late passer-by. They go elaborately into description, and are strong on the brooding hush, but the thing has never been done satisfactorily.”

Have you read her novels? If so I would love to hear your comments about her writing style, and topics.

Doors- Rochester Kent

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Rochester has some amazing doors, and funny enough, loads of very crooked doors. This door once led to an amazing Sunday Roast, with potatoes crisped to perfection in goose fat, and rare roast beef on offer. If one could manage … Continue reading →

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Guest Post-Ted’s literary friend- Kate Shrewsbury and Macaulay the dog.

I always love finding another Terrier lover, and double joy,  a great writing friend. Kate Shrewsbury has an amazing blog which I read weekly.  I love her style of writing, and wanted to share one of her posts with you, which my Ted, would whole heartily approve of. Kate’s dog is Ted’s kinda chap.

The Terrier’s Apprentice

This entry was posted on January 26, 2013, in Macaulay The Dog stories and tagged Britain, cats, dogs, humor, humour, terriers. Bookmark the permalink.60 Comments

You don’t get a terrier for his gentlemanly habits.

I think we’ve been over this before. You want something that primps and preens? Get a poodle. A ribboned handbag dweller? Something chihuahua-based. An affable stick-chaser? That would be your labrador. Does tricks? Collie.

Terriers are like irascible old men and women. They like life the way they like it, thank you, and if that means every walk is just a deeply elaborate chain-widdle and your favourite cologne is forest fox-poo: get used to it.

Our dog Macaulay’s house habits are questionable. As I sit here writing this, he is engaging in noisy ablutions far better staged behind closed doors. He steals things, and drinks from mugs of half-cold empty tea and hot chocolate. He snores.

When you tell him off he does not look cowed or penitent like any half-decent retriever would: he sits down and scratches furiously. This has two advantages for Macaulay. i) It shows he is not listening. LaLaLaLaLaLa, so to speak.

And ii) it plants insidious unease in the admonisher that despite the highly expensive monthly treatments to keep little visitors away, he has fleas.

Terriers give the impression they are just your average intellect, but in fact they are fiendishly clever. Cleverer than the souls who herd sheep, or run through hoops and jump over obstacle courses for  men’s satisfaction. Your average terrier uses his little grey cells for his own purposes. Which are: theft, subversion, filth and fermentation, guzzling and gratification.

Of course, the humans who choose to give a terrier a home live for the moments when a terrier’s agenda includes its owner. For their saving grace is that we are part of their routine,  a warm hearth and a lap at the end of a hard day’s putting the natural world to rights. They don’t like us because they have to, but because they want to.

In September, Macaulay’s comfortable routine changed forever. In a misguided attempt to replace the last cat as some kind of company during the day, his family bought him a kitten.

The moment Clive Bond the small black bundle of kitten arrived he, and we, knew things had changed irrevocably. This was not some prissy simpering lapcat but a bloke, a brawny opinionated man-puma, whose personal habits were questionable, and who picked delighted fights, even as a small kitten, with the house mutt.

They joust. They choose to inhabit the same space. In fact I would venture that Macaulay and Clive have reached an understanding: that Clive admires Macaulay immensely even if he does nip his toes and charge at him from odd directions.

And Macaulay has started teaching Clive the trade.

Like a small hairy Fagin, Mac has begun teaching his charge to steal sachets of food and transport them to Mac’s domain, the floor. I will find empty sachets licked silver-clean in the middle of the sitting room rug. And Clive has learnt that advantageous things live in mugs. He has developed an unsettling penchant for cold tea.

I told him off the other day. He had got onto the dining room table to sample some cereal and milk. There is only one word which will stop him in his tracks: a loud “no”. “No! I bawled unbecomingly.

And strink me pink if he didn’t sit down and scratch.

I could almost hear Mac telling him: It’s a great tactic, mate. It makes them think you’re not listening.

“And it gives them the willies ’cause they’re scared you’ve got fleas.”

If you want to read more of Kate, here’s the link!

 http://kateshrewsday.com/2013