12/02/15: The Horniman Museum & Gardens

I've always found leaving the house to be a bit more of a gamble in our capital than in, say, my native Bedfordshire. You can never be sure of TFLs honesty in their proffering of a 'good service', it can be difficult to predict the proximity to which you'll experience the National Gallery's latest (portraits by John Singer Sargent, by the way although I've not yet had the chance to go) & then there's the universal likelihood of having to retreat indoors for fear of frozen fingers or soggy sandwiches. I must admit that I was a little suspect of the sunshine that cast its shadows over my morning cuppa this Sunday (how apt) just gone but I decided that I would take the chance & make some plans. Y'see, I managed about a week of wellness between colds & after failed attempts at 'recuperation' (read: incubation) I thought it worth trying to exorcise my demons in the fresh air (or at least attempt to pass them onto all of the small children swarming around this particular destination) 

I must admit that although I knew of the Horniman Museum & Gardens as a fabled place tucked up away in Forest Hill just south of the New Cross that I, however reluctantly, called home for a year but had somehow never made the trip. It was Dulcie of Human Sea's blog post that recalled it to mind & I thought that it would be the perfect place to venture on my own & finally make a round trip to Goldsmiths Library (even?) more educational than usual. So it was onto the overground just after noon that I made my way on Sunday, bundled up in a chunky cable knit & with scarf wound around my coat, Paris Review slung into a tote bag for good measure. The bracing walk from the station proved fruitful as I inevitably couldn't resist a peek into the Sue Ryder en route & emerged with a thick, jersey ASOS dress with low back that I'm looking forward to layering with stripes. As I shudder at the thought of bralettes under my blanket at home with hot tea within reach, it's worth mentioning that this particular Sunday was so blissfully warm & bright that I had dug my hands out of my pockets & filled one with my hat by the time I reached the museum, convinced of the benefits of some south-of-the-river air.

The Horniman was exactly as I had hoped: old-fashioned, quaint, wondrous & a touch spooky. I spent the best part of an hour wandering slowly from case to case from familiar monkey skeletons to elephant skulls to the ribcages of birds. There were kangaroos, alligators, monkeys, armadillos (not holiday ones, to my knowledge), turtles, ostriches & vultures with the models quite difficult to tell apart from the real ones, only obvious in case of scale. I felt most attracted to the birds although I am quite frightened of them, to tell the truth & spent an eerie five minutes resolutely staring into the face of a particularly keen-eyed vulture. Their feet were almost as big as mine. I've always had something of a fascination with taxidermy (i.e never able to resist peering through the grates of 'Get Stuffed' at the top of Essex Road) & the ability to study such a number of creatures at such close range meant that my curiosity was certainly satisfied. It was at this point that I suspected my snottiness might be holding sway after all & decided on retiring to a bench with a cup of coffee & a pear packed by way of a picnic. As the name might suggest, Forest Hill provides you with a view of whole swathes of London including the Shard from bottom to top. Truth be told, I was happy to sit in the sun & contentedly consider whether to take off my coat. Oh happy day indeed.

I won't take my current bobble hat-tedness as a signal of failure. I'll just look forward to even more sunny days like these, even if part of them are spent in the shade of that infamous stuffed walrus.

Have you visited the Horniman?

Speak soon - O.

05/02/15: Literary lately #5 feat. Ben Lerner & Lorrie Moore

I'm having one of those days during which I just completely fail to get it together. Okay, week. Okay, month. I'm still holding out hope that it'll happen one of these days though & it might just start here. You never can tell.

You'd also be forgiven for thinking that I don't read a lot of books for someone who works in a bookshop & has named her blog after a group of 1950s poets (/one of her favourite root vegetables) You'll have to take my word for it that I have been reading books but without, err, writing about reading those books. My last dedicated literary lately post was, to my shame, aaaall the way back in August when I was immersed in the Lydia Davis collection that I got for Christmas (some things don't change) & the less sunshine-y Albert Camus. Since then I've written an essay on the former & finished one whole quarter of my MA degree that I started back in August, as well as starting on another: 20th Century American Poetry. Accordingly, I have been reading a lot of dry 1990s literary criticism borrowed from the library on the likes of Theodore Roethke & A. R. Ammons to established the free verse/formalist traditions at the heart of modern American poetry. Four weeks in & we're finally getting into the more intriguing figures such as Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath & John Ashbery. My seminars are just two hours a week so I've no excuses not to pore over the chapters in anthologies on Lowell & the luridly lilac cover of Anne Sexton's 'The Awful Rowing Toward God'. The time spent establishing these poets in contexts both critical & biographical I've found to be very valuable when it comes to contributing in class.

That said, not having to read two novels in the space of five days also leaves me with a lot to consider outside of the syllabus. There's something of a buzz around Ben Lerner, one no doubt causing long-term fans to heave a heavy 'at long last', as he's brought out his second novel '10:04' by the ever-brilliant Granta Books. I got to talking to one of these fanatics in my seminar who urged me to read his first 'Leaving The Atocha Station', the story of a young poet on a fellowship in Spain. I went straight to the library following our seminar that day & disturbed a considerable number of people as I laughed & grimaced my way through its length & took it home with me to finish before bed. Lerner has a wry wit that I recognise in the work of other American authors such as Lorrie Moore & A.M Homes & his view of human relationships is similarly astute. From the protagonist's delusional belief that his Spanish language deficiency lends him profound mystique to his repeated failings to comprehend the world that he views from the roof of his apartment, often with a joint in hand, 'Leaving The Atocha Station' has such a distinctive voice & hopelessly unsympathetic speaker that left me surprised at having enjoyed it so much. I've already earmarked a copy of his latest to nab from a friend.

'Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.'

The other novel that I've been reading in between poems for class is from the aforementioned Lorrie Moore & titled ' The Gate At The Stairs'. Having become belatedly possessed by her (I now realise) well-known shorter fiction, I was interested to see whether her style would carry over a significantly larger amount of pages. Suffice to say that it did. Described as 'set in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks' & depicting the story of a 'twenty-year old Midwestern woman's coming of age', I was so captivated by this character, Tassie, in whom I saw so many shades of myself. Through the prism of Tassie's college education & it's varying fluctuations of vacation & term time, the novel charts her encounters with a harsh world outside of that she's inhabited from childhood - becoming entangled in the lives of the family she serves as nanny for, enduring a failed love affair & reconciling her lives at home & away from it. Moore's descriptions of temperamental or precarious domestic arrangements & the listlessness of higher education & its reasonably small lack of demand on your time, most of the time, really resonated with me.

'On the night table there sat some mint tea that had been steeping there since morning, stone cold and medicinally brown. I sipped a little, its soggy bag falling against my mouth; then I gargled and drank the rest.'

I have a couple of my favourite literary journals to be reading in spare moments: the latest issue of Granta that features India (an exceedingly under-explored area both in my study of geography & literature) & the latest from The Paris Review that features some pieces from Karl Ove Knausgaard. Now to actually read them & not indulge my ridiculous habit of delayed gratification.

Have you read any Ben Lerner or Lorrie Moore?

What've you been reading lately?
Speak soon - O.