Posts by Carol Stewart
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to Russell Brown,
I think this sounds entirely good and right for K road. The Norway comparison is probably more appropriate to, say, central Otago landscapes which have such a distinct character.
-
Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to Sacha,
Who gets to decide what colour you paint your house?
Well, actually, in Norway, the authorities do. Apparently, in some locations at least, there is an approved range of paint colours for house exteriors. And you know what? The landscape is really very beautiful and harmonious as a result. Check this out - Norway is quite well represented in this list.
NB: my sole claim to authority here is in having a Norwegian auntie, and in having visited the countryside around Sognefjord.
-
Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to Paul Williams,
Precisely, where's he nowadays?
Here.
-
Hard News: About Arie, in reply to Tony Kennedy,
I have been on the verge of cancelling my SST sub for a while now - time for action.
-
Fuck the Pacific Rim.
Damn you, plate tectonics. Enough already.
-
Hard News: The Thread, It Is Open, in reply to chris,
Well, if you must go down that track, Chris, I would suggest keeping the diplomacy/honesty ratio very high indeed.
It'd be an interesting thought experiment - what would happen if we were to conduct all our social interactions with total honesty? Would it be better or worse? My feeling is that it would all turn to custard pretty quickly.
-
Aren't little white lies social lubricants, Chris? Where's the gain in hurting Phyllis's feelings?
-
Hard News: The Thread, It Is Open, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Those ancestors may have used penile spines to remove the sperm of competitors when they mated with females
Fascinating; just like the vaginal complexity of the ducks (or was it Isabella Rossellini?)
-
NSFW, but heck, it's science.
-
Hard News: The Thread, It Is Open, in reply to Rich Lock,
A question that has been troubling me for some time: what the hell was Ms Potter on when she wrote Pigling Bland?
Rich, I know the answer to that. She was having a dark night of the soul.
In 1933, the novelist Graham Greene published an article about Beatrix Potter. He came partly to praise her, not so much for her exquisite illustrations, which dovetail so perfectly with the simplicity of the storytelling, as for the truthful and unemotional power of Potter's narrative voice. Greene had read Beatrix Potter's books in childhood, and, like his contemporary Evelyn Waugh, believed that her style of "gentle detachment" had exerted a formative influence on the development of his own writing.
But Greene discerned something else in Potter's work. With his tongue only slightly in cheek, he observed that her great comedies - Two Bad Mice, Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, Tom Kitten, Mrs Tiggy Winkle, and Mr Jeremy Fisher - had been followed by the darker tragedies, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Mr Tod, and Pigling Bland. This pessimism reached its climax with The Tale of Mr Tod. Between 1907 and 1909, he wrote, "Miss Potter must have passed through an emotional ordeal which changed the character of her genius", though Greene acknowledged that it would be "impertinent" to enquire into its precise nature.Impertinent indeed. From the Lake District farm to which she had retreated at the height of her productivity and success as a writer, Beatrix Potter took the rare step of issuing Greene with a stern rebuke. She had been suffering from flu, not emotional disturbance, while writing Mr Tod, and in any case she sharply deprecated "the Freudian school" of criticism.