#blacklamb24
#tokarczuk24
“My Year in Books” from Goodreads. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was not only the longest but maybe my favorite of the year. Reading it was an incredible journey. And Tokarczuk is one of my favorite authors. Lost Soul was quiet and thoughtful and beautifully illustrated.
Finished last night - thanks KM for leading #BlackLamb24 ! Parting quote: "...art gives us hope that history may change its spots and man become honourable. What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience. ...It must not be copied, it must be remembered...." #art #RebeccaWest
While I was at it, I also finished #BlackLamb24. The ending as of 1941 is very powerful.
I'd probably never have read the book without this project, and it's been a great experience!
#BlackLamb24 Good to have lovable Constantine back after his glowering in Montenegro: "Now do I feel an upright man. I know I am only a clean man, but I feel I am also upright."
#BlackLamb24 "the widow ... stood in the centre of the room, responding with unexpected animation by contralto cluckings and coy agitations of her black draperies; it was as if we had pleased a rookery".
Can't go wrong with an animal simile!
#BlackLamb24 A sentence only an Aberdonian can fully appreciate: "he longed to speak of the abode of joy, a blend of Venice in Carnival time and the New Jerusalem, to which his memory had transformed Aberdeen."
#BlackLamb24 Seen by RW: "They want to be right, not to do right. They feel no obligation to be part of the main tide of life, and if that meant any degree of pollution they would prefer to divert themselves from it and form a standing pool of purity".
#BlackLamb24 "a bouquet ... that had form and a tune of colour. All Slavs, except those who become florists, have a natural genius for arranging flowers." Style over substance, but good style.
#BlackLamb24 RW being brilliant: "He tells us something of Stephen Dushan which we can believe because it is not credible ".
#BlackLamb24 Two big disquisitions on art and culture recently: I thought RW on the sacrifice episode was ridiculously reductive (Shakespeare thumbs down, Austen thumbs up); brilliant on Grachanitsa, with the hermits fizzing with ideas and sympathetic analysis of the frescos.
photograph of purple crocuses just beginning to open
"... a persuasion toward sanity; a belief that life, painful as it is, is not too painful for the endurance of the mind..." Rebecca West #BlackLamb24
#BlackLamb24 More reminders that the coming storm was already visible when RW visited: "these pictures ... might some day be brought to the ground with the slash of a bayonet and die under the hot tide of their own glass when the smoke rose from the burning walls".
"'But do not be distressed,' he said kindly. 'I shall think more kindly of the lie now it has given me the pleasure of your visit. Will you take some Turkish delight with your coffee?'" #BlackLamb24 How disconcerting to live in such a deceptive society- one way is to find the good in each day.
"It appears doubtful whether Tolstoy ever saw a peasant. In the imbecile work "What is Art?" he asserts that peasants appreciate only pictures wh. inculcate a moral lesson...and only a person perverted by luxury can care for art wh. is created without a specific didactic aim." Wrong. #BlackLamb24
#blacklamb24 Ever heard of frumenty?
#medievalcooking
historydollop.com/2020/03/15/f...
#BlackLamb24 "the cats -- I apply here a serious test of civilization -- are plump and unapprehensive".
#BlackLamb24 Gerda strikes again- this time with breadsticks and hair-do's. "I suppose this is the kind of conversation one would have in hell." #OchridV Anyone else think of her as a gas leak?
#BlackLamb24 RW at it again, repeating her idea that Turkish has no word for "interesting". Googling led to an Arabic textbook which refutes the same myth about that language; "The student can judge the quality of English-Arabic dictionaries by the number of Arabic words given for 'interesting'."
#BlackLamb24 "He spoke with something that was not quite curiosity, that was more tactile; the effect was as if a very gentle blind person were running his fingers over one's features."
Lovely in itself, then perfectly juxtaposed with the nun who had me cackling out loud!
"That is what it says in the books. But what does that mean? How did these events look and sound and smell? That can be learned on the top of the hill at Ochrid, in the Church of Sveti Kliment, and the other churches up there which were built in that age." 710 #BlackLamb24 #SerboByzantine #Ochrid
"...we promised ourselves we would have this short time together, doing nothing but seeing new things and being quiet. Why should we have this woman who hates us typing herself round our necks?" #BlackLamb24 #Nerisi #StandUpToBullies #LoseGerda
"Nature, it is well known, always supplies its own antidote, and if it is natural for men to feel superior to women it is also natural fo women to feed them with henbane when this superiority is carried past a joke." Gerda is the exception. #BlackLamb24 #Macedonia #Nerisi Glad they ditched her -
"Two things which should be together, which illumine each other, had strayed far apart, only to be joined for a minute or two at rare intervals in the attention of casual visitors." Blake's poem and the vivid fresco of the infant Christ & a fury. #BlackLamb24 #Macedonia
allpoetry.com/poem/1460818...
discover later in life that they are heartless companions who have accidentally yoked with us, and who are as likely as not in our extreme sickness or old age to treat us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of the worse bandits." (2/2) #Matka #BlackLamb24 #ProustTogether
#BlackLamb24 #ProustTogether "There is demonstrated that separateness of the flesh which Proust once noted, in a passage which describes how we think in our youth that our bodies are identical with ourselves, and have the same interests, but - " (1/2)
#BlackLamb24 Lovely observation today: "a group of formidable old men from some mountain village, each with the eye and lope of a wolf, and all with tender pink rosebuds embroidered on their woollen socks."
#BlackLamb24 "All over this city of two natures there is demonstrated the contrast between Christian impudence, immoderation, audacity in search of daylight, & the Turkish thrifty limitation to the small cell where anything not delightful cannot enter." 651 #Skoplje #Macedonia
#BlackLamb24 "The East is said to have the same effect as drugs on those who frequent it, and certainly this town, which was so much next door to the East that one was a good as through the door, exercised that same power of making the ordinary delicious." 649 #Skoplje #Macedonia
