RIP Louise Bourgeois, 1911-2010

Look at this cheery old lady with the big willy under her arm that she made herself!

Her work was so rude and scary. She made terrifying, huge spider sculptures and her first work was an image of her father made out of dough and spit, right in front of his eyes.

She really freaked him out, as well as countless others, but her sculptures and installations had a fascinating, dreamy quality to them which fused nightmare and childish imagination so perfectly.

This is a big miss for the art world.

Portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe, Room installation by Peter Bellamy and Maman spider at  Capodimante Museum Bourgeois retrospective.

Reading Women by Stefan Bollmann

Anyone who enjoyed the images of women with books posted by Persephone last week in honour of the publication Forbidden Fruit may also be delighted by this book which was bought on impulse a couple of years ago. It was useless to resist.

It has recently been repackaged and renamed Women Who Read Are Dangerous:

The foreword by Karen Joy Fowler begins "We women who read should take a moment, put down the book, this or any other, look around us. We are experiencing a rare period of triumph."

Fowler goes on to explain that the idea of reading silently, especially if you were a woman, was once seen as a threat. It was idle, it was secretive, independent and even unchaste. People worried about their daughters reading in the same way that modern day parents fret about hours spent on the games console.

 "She might while the book lasts, be a completely different person from the one we are seeing. She might be a man; this is all too likely. She might be a horse and at the very moment we look at her, she might despair, finding herself sold at auction, sent to the glue factory. She might be a rabbit. She might be a hobbit."

Several images follow, some spread across two pages of, yes, women reading. There are images from the Middle Ages:

Photographs: (this one is of Alice Liddell, namesake of Alice in Wonderland.)

We are shown women who are young...

...and those older:

Women indulge themselves in books leisurely and with lazy pleasure...

... but some have to sneak a few moments from a working day:

Illustrations also appear:

Paintings by Van Gogh,  Hugo Van Der Goes and the wonderful Carl Larsson are included as well as photographs of Lee Miller (she's reading the paper whilst having breakfast in bed!) and Marilyn Monroe.

This volume can be read as a book or dipped into whenever the mood dictates. Buy it, buy it, buy it.

Granta No.110, Spring 2010, S*x

The asterisk in the title of this post about Spring 2010's issue of Granta Magazine is not due to prudery, but because I do not wish to attract pesky, porny spam to this blog any earlier than its inevitable arrival. This ploy will probably not work.

Granta has always been a great place to find new writing from authors both established and up-and-coming.

Under the editorship of Ian Jack, a journalist by trade (and a great writer), the magazine seemed to consist mainly of reportage and memoir but it has recently begun to include more poetry, illustration and art photography.

S*x is a beautifully designed book with provocative cover photo by Billie Segal, gold lettering on the front and hot pink lettering on the spine and back.

The writing ranges from poignant memoir,( The Unwritable by Mark Doty); a fictional story about Kiyoko, the only female on a desert island populated by castaways, (Tokyo Island by Natsuo Kirino) and straight up erotica ( This is For You by Emmanuel Carrere).

I really love that Granta is more visual now. Dave Eggars provides four hilarious illustrations entitled Four Animals Contemplating S*x; there are photographs of deserted adult film sets by Jo Broughton and a strange, dreamy collection of images by Yann Faucher called Body.

I have not read the whole magazine yet as I prefer to dip in and out of it, giving each piece its own time and space. I am particularly looking forward to the Jeanette Winterson short story at the end; The Agony of Intimacy. She is an author who I have always been interested in reading but have not yet properly sampled.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

Francie, the young protagonist of Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is a wonderful character because she is a real little girl. Her circumstances may not be the same as the readers' (unless of course you live in turn of the 20th century Brooklyn), but her inner life and fears are so easy to relate to.

She is not an orphan, nor do her parents seem to be mere shadowy background figures in their child's thrilling, magical adventures. She has a very vividly painted home life.

We know what she eats, (stale bread dumplings),exactly what her house looks like,( a corridor) and we see her being scolded by her mother and comforted by her beloved yet useless father. We also see clearly that she is her father's favourite, but that her mother prefers her brother, Neely.

Instead of travelling through time, Francie looks at an old man's toe sticking out of a broken shoe and is hit by the idea of mortality. She does not find treasure, but knows the joys of peeling open a lychee and making a 'potsy' for hopscotch with a run-over tin can. She peers down the ventilation shaft in her bedroom and imagines that it's Purgatory and knows no greater felicity than sitting out on her fire escape on a sunny day with five cents worth of pink and white wafers and a brand new library book.

'As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy, and all alone in the house, the leaf shadows shifted and the afternoon passed. About four o'clock, the flats in the tenement across from Francie's yard came to life. Through the leaves, she looked into the uncurtained windows and saw growlers being rushed out and returned overflowing with cool foaming beer. Kids ran in and out, going to and returning from the butchers, the grocer's and the baker's. Women came in with bulky hock-shop bundles. The man's Sunday suit was home again. On Monday, it would go back to the pawnbroker's for another week.'

Francie does not encounter any evil witches or monsters, just cruel neighbourhood kids, bitter teachers and the terrifying child killer who made my blood run cold 17 years ago, when I first read the book, and now, still.

This is a book that can be revisited countless times as the reader ages and there is always more to find and enjoy. This is partly because Francie's story is traced from before her conception until her early adulthood and partly because this book is not only a coming of age story, but an excellent social history of immigrant life in early 20th century New York. The adult characters are just as complex and sympathetic as Francie's and they swim into a clearer focus as the reader ages. It is rich and therefore endlessly rewarding.

It is a pity that the old Heinemann edition seems not only to be out of print but off the face of the planet. It's cover image was this Julia Margaret Cameron image (see below) which led me to her photographic work. The image above is taken from the film poster. Unusually for a book so beloved, the film adaptation is very satisfying and heartbreaking.

Where did I first hear about this profoundly moving life companion of a book? A character from the series 1990s hit series The Babysitter's Club had to do a book report on it. The glittering burn of culture is a wonderful thing!