Zhu Xiao-Mei – The Secret Piano

Tags

Bach, Book Review, China, Ellen Hinsey (Translator), Mao Tse Tung, The Cultural Revolution, Zhu Xiao-Mei

Mao, Tao, Bach and a Piano

I’m embarrassed, as a lover of classical music, not to have heard of the classical pianist Zhu Xiao-Mei, until very recently, coming by chance across her wonderful autobiography, The Secret Piano. Perhaps, given her history which is a history of her country in the latter half of the twentieth century, this is not so surprising

Zhu Xiao Mei was born in 1949, to an artistic, bourgeois, intellectual family. From a very early age she showed an extraordinary musical aptitude. However, the possession of a piano in a family home was at this time yet another indication that the family was not ‘a good family’ Bourgeois, revisionist, not revolutionary.

She was however born just in time to have some years of training at China’s premier classical music college, before the launching of The Cultural Revolution in 1966 changed the lives of her generation. Bourgeois thought was to be rooted out. The young, impressionable to exploitation, something totalitarian regimes of left and right have capitalised on, became the vanguard of the Cultural Revolution, condemning any who showed individualist, critical thinking towards Mao Tse-Tung thought, as deified in The Little Red Book.

Intellectuals were sent to work camps for ‘Re-education’ This happened to every member of her family – sent to different camps. She spent 5 years in a workcamp, which seemed to have a remarkable similarity to some accounts of the gulags.

Her destiny, which had seemed, from her early prowess, to indicate a life as an exceptional concert pianist, was far from realisation. After Mao’s death, when a thaw in relationships between East and West began to happen, the flame that music was for her, could only express itself in lowly ways. She finally managed to complete her interrupted musical education, and began working as an accompanist for the training dancers at Beijing’s Dance Academy.

I often wonder whether I should hate Mao Tse-Tung for what he did to me. On a purely theoretical level, his analyses were not incorrect. The Chinese people did need to be liberated. How could I forget the documentary they screened for us at school,, which showed the sign the English erected at the entrance to Waitan Park. On it was clearly written “Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted”

She left China for America, determined to try and study her art further, and supported her studies by various jobs – some completely unconnected with her musicality, such as house-cleaning.

Things began to change for her in the eighties. She moved to Paris (where she still lives) and where her ability was recognised so that, as she continued with her studies, she was at least able to get work teaching the piano.

This book (beautifully translated by Ellen Hinsey) shows Zhu Xiao-Mei to be an exceptional human being, as well as musician. She has, of course, been scarred by the experience of the Cultural Revolution, where idealistic and impressionable young people were brainwashed into acts of betrayal because they believed they were acting in the common good. She does not spare herself from culpability. The experience has left her not quite able to trust. However……..she is a deeply reflective, modest, spiritual individual, and indeed, one of great generosity of heart and soul, great authenticity. SHE does not say these things of herself – but this listener found these qualities in her work

 

There is a poignant moment, on a plane, on her way to America where she learns, for the first time, about the philosophical and ethical inheritance of her country, as exemplified by Lao-tzu – of whom she had never heard, as all this was hidden, regarded as deviant and retrograde, when the doctrine of her country was the one religion of Mao Tse-Tung Thought.

Before playing a work…I need to be peaceful, to empty my mind.

The Chinese are well acquainted with this way of seeing things; they often use the image of water to illustrate it. To see down to the bottom of a lake, the water must be calm and still. The calmer the water, the farther down one can see. The exact same thing is true for the mind – the more tranquil and detached one is, the greater the depths one can plumb….it is precisely by following this path of self-effacement and emptiness that one attains the truth of a musical work. Without attempting to impose one’s will, without forcing something on the listener. Without struggling with the self. By disappearing behind the composer

Quotations and reflections from Lao-Tzu,and Confucius – and Jesus, clearly inform her way of being, and the Tao infuses her understanding and interpretation of Bach, in particular, whom she describes as the most Chinese of composers, the composer closest to comprehension and inhabitation by a Chinese person

Only now I am able to understand the extent to which my experience of the Cultural Revolution taught me to never use music’s power to impose anything on my audience. I suffered too much under the yoke of servitude, and I prefer to speak rather than to compel

This is a wonderful, moving, soulful book, very humbling to read.

Strongly recommended.

As are her handful of CDs. She clearly is an exceptionally gifted communicator using the language of words. What she does with the language of music is something else again

The Secret Piano UK
The Secret Piano USA

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Rose Tremain – Rosie

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Autobiography, Book Review, Rose Tremain, Rosie

Goodbye Rosie, Hello Rose

I am a huge fan of Rose Tremain. She is an author who always writes and observes beautifully, but does not have just one book within her, regurgitated in different ways. She constantly surprises.

So I was interested to read what looked like a remarkably slim autobiography, Rosie : Scenes From A Vanished Life

That ‘vanished life’ is Rosie herself, as she claimed her true identity as Rose

This is beautifully written, but curiously distanced, distancing.

Born into a rather privileged background, at least in terms of status and finance – her stepfather was after all a ‘Sir’ and her real father’s cousin, her childhood was nonetheless curiously lacking in parental attention, encouragement and warm regard. In fact, her mother, referred to as ‘Jane’ by Tremain, and not by any maternal appellation, had lacked love and affection herself as a child, and had also been called by a name she disliked, rechristening herself as Jane.

Rosie’s First Birthday

Children – and the adults they become, sustain damage from absent affection, they don’t have to be actively ill-treated to bear wounds.

I found myself wondering about the kind of distance with which Rose writes about herself. This isn’t a ‘misery memoir’ but it does have a kind of lack of warmth in it. I found this unsettling because she is a writer whose characters are warmly and fully regarded by her. The reader of a Tremain novel is drawn into feeling that they really know her complex and beautifully rounded characters. Yet, the sense here is that Tremain did not really want the reader to know Rosie. Somehow, the child and the young girl sent off to be ‘finished’ in Switzerland, rather than pursue the academic route she wanted are seen through a screen. Which is a curious place to be writing some kind of autobiography from

Rosie, her loving and beloved Nannie Nan, and her sister Jo

This is rather like picking up a collection of faded snapshots, which have intriguing titles, but they are incomplete, part of a larger collection, which probably were mounted in sequence in an album, and told a larger story, but this is missing.

This is probably one which will be most interesting to those who love and know her writing. As she is at pains to point out, she is not an ‘autobiographical’ novelist per se, but certainly small events make their way into the novels and stories, and she references these.

There was one recounted incident where Rose drew me close to Rosie, and I felt great grief for her. Her inspired music teacher at the boarding school she was sent away to, arranged for a concert to be given by her pupils. A prestigious one, at the Royal Festival Hall. Though open to the public, the majority of the most expensive seats would be bought by proud families. Who would then take their children out for a congratulatory tea. Except Rosie’s mother and stepfather did not come. She wrote to her real father (who had abandoned his family for a liaison with another woman) He was a writer, and also a keen pianist himself. Though he did come, he left at the interval, after Rosie had played, and did not come back to take his daughter for tea

In conclusion, I liked this very much indeed, but remain slightly confused as to the purpose of its writing. There is half the sense of a catharsis (perhaps) for the writer – except that the feeling I was left with was an unresolved, and even covert anger and resentment (completely understandable) still within the child inside the woman.

Here is a wonderful excerpt, a moment of epiphany, an ‘aha’ moment, where the idea of writing, as something profound and meaningful, hit the thirteen year old

The perfume of the day, the heat of my body after the tennis game, the sky the colour of coral, the silence surrounding me – all combined to fill me, suddenly, with a profound feeling of wonder, a fleeting sense of the marvellous, which, in its intensity, was almost a visionary experience.

I told myself that if I continued standing still, this moment would last and might even change me in some way that I couldn’t quite foresee. But I stood there so long that the sun almost disappeared and the field became full of shadows. And with the dusk came a feeling of desolation. The desolation was simply a mundane recognition of the fleeting nature of everything, which even teenagers (or perhaps especially teenagers) understand. A moment of happiness as intense as this slips quickly away with the turning of the earth. So I asked myself, there in the hayfield, with the swear of the tennis game drying down my back and making me shiver: was there any way in which the experiences of my life, like this one, could be captured and locked away, not just in capricious, gradually fading memory, but in some more concrete form

Rosie UK
Rosie USA

Michael Blakemore – Arguments with England

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Arguments with England, Autobiography, Book Review, Michael Blakemore, Theatre

The play’s the thing…………and how!

I was enthralled by the 2013 Stage Blood, Blakemore’s account of the early days of the National Theatre in its new South Bank home, and the last days of the company at the Old Vic, under, first of all, Sir Laurence Olivier as the Artistic Director, and then, Peter Hall’s first few years of tenure. Blakemore had been invited to join as an Associate director by Olivier, whom he much admired, and had interesting things to say about Hall. As in, ‘may you live in interesting (conflicting/disputatious) times’ He had some prior history with Hall, and resigned (as did some others) not liking the direction Hall was taking.

This book, published some 9 years earlier (2004) is amongst other things, a far more obviously autobiographical book than Stage Blood, though of course Blakemore’s experience of those 5 years at the National, is nonetheless an individual’s account, it is still focused on the history of an organisation in which the author was deeply involved

Arguments with England is Michael Blakemore’s sense of himself, and his personal history which has been lived as an Australian who came to this country to follow a path in theatre, drawn here by the experience of seeing that tradition of classical theatre in Australia, as exemplified by tours from ‘the mother country’ with some towering figures at their helm. Of which one was Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, on tour with the Old Vic Theatre Company.

Blakemore, arriving in the UK in 1950, though always desirous of directing, started as an actor, auditioning and being accepted at RADA and then following the life of a jobbing, but steadily more successful middle range actor. This book charts that life, and his long start and stop writing of his novel, Next Season. I was fascinated (despite his later disclaimer that he had amalgamated characters and incidents and no specific individual was portrayed) to so clearly be able to identify characters from that novel, in this autobiographical account

There is quite a lot of information about various affairs Blakemore had, plus personal stuff which really belongs to others. I always feel a little uneasy with these revelations – only because I wonder how those various partners might feel about their histories being revealed. I can only hope permission was given. Reading this book, I found myself full of – I’m not sure if I want to write admiration or compassion for his wife, who seems to be a woman of extraordinary – tolerance, or long-standing broadmindedness. Or, perhaps laid unfairly low by her loving heart. The marriage was/is an ‘open’ one, but as often, it seems this means males wanting freedom to roam, and women being dangled. Blakemore expressed, often in this book that he had had no intention of leaving his marriage, and I also felt compassion for the woman with whom he had a long standing affair.

Be that as it is, I hurry along to praise the fascinating writing about the process of acting itself, the details of performances Blakemore saw, with actors he admired hugely, accounts of his own discoveries, anguishes and successes with rehearsals and performance and also the wonderful view of England and English society and culture which is revealed by an outsider’s eye. It always fascinates me, how someone from another culture views ours (and how we view theirs)

If the industrial wasteland I was passing through on my way to Huddersfield spoke of the selective blindness of those fortunate enough to live elsewhere, it also said something about the perverse social obedience of the thousands dumped in the middle of it. Similarly the fondness for secrecy among those who governed….could only be indulged by a constituency happy not to know. I could see that the class system, the acceptance of which was so incomprehensible to an outsider, was shored up most crucially by its victims, a population obsessed with deference…..By the mid-sixties England would be a country in which I felt lucky to have found refuge. By the mid-eighties, as the old heartlessness found new ways to assert itself, I would be less sure

Blakemore had (and has) absolute passion and intelligence for theatre, and whether he is writing about the experience of the audience, exploring acting itself, or directing, or writing for theatre, and the collaborations between director, writer, actors, designers and the technical side of bringing vision to reality, this is an utterly fascinating account.

Up till now I had relied as an actor on my small store of sophistication and assurance, and had got nowhere. Only now, when I was making use of the most vulnerable and naked aspects of myself had I come up with something of real interest….I began to see that notwithstanding its occasional triumphs, its conspicuously public success, there was at the heart of an actor’s life an aspect of public confession, something perplexed and even grieving

It is also, at times, laugh out loud funny. Blakemore is a sharp and funny writer, never more so than when pricking his own balloon
Arguments with England UK
Arguments with England USA

Michael Blakemore – Stage Blood

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Book Review, Michael Blakemore, National Theatre, Stage Blood, Theatre History

Idealism, intelligence and inspiration – and much skulduggery : The National Theatre 1971-1976

Actor and theatre director Michael Blakemore is also a wonderful writer on matters theatrical. This is the case whether this be in his one novel, Next Season, published in 1969, or, as here, his factual account of the early beginnings of the National Theatre, published a mere 5 years ago

I came across Next Season in the late 80s, republished by Faber with a very fine introduction by Simon Callow, who recounted it being passed round in plain covers, almost like a banned book, backstage and front of house at the National Theatre, still based at the Old Vic. The reason for its seditious reputation was because it was rumoured that it was a possibly thinly disguised account of some regrettable theatrical tendencies which Blakemore was experiencing and observing at the time of writing.(the book was published in the late 60s), Blakemore, by then a director at the Glasgow Citizens had worked as an actor at the RSC – which is where he initially encountered both Laurence Olivier and Peter Hall, both of whom inevitably figure heavily in Stage Blood. Rumour said that the charismatic, wonderful star actor Ivan Spears was imagined with Olivier in mind, or that at least the imagination, intelligence and power of Spears’ work came from Blakemore’s observation and knowledge of Olivier, whom he clearly much admired. Less welcome would have been the rumour that Tom Chester, the bureaucratic speaking power hungry director, a coming new breed to usurp the actor’s centre stage position, was modelled on Hall, a man of a certain devious reputation for stealing limelight and invention from others

National Theatre South Bank in construction, 1971

In 1971 Blakemore was appointed by Olivier as an Associate Director at the Old Vic based National, then preparing for its new South Bank Home. Although Olivier was at times difficult, devious and autocratic, Blakemore makes clear that his guiding star was the glory of theatre itself, and the building of a company of excellence, a community of artists, and that being part of this was the idea of the arts as a necessary service to society. By 1973 Olivier, in many ways a representation of the ‘Actor Manager’ was replaced as Artistic Director by Peter Hall, a man possibly for far greedier times. Under Hall, the idea of that community of artists began to break down, Hall was interested in star power, and, to be fair, the prospect of far higher remuneration in TV and films was making it harder to keep acting companies together. More equal contracts were being replaced, and the gap between the wages of the leading actors and the spear carriers was dramatically and ostentatiously rising.

Sir Laurence Olivier and Peter Hall

Hall himself of course published his own account of his time at the National, in the Peter Hall Diaries. Blakemore here gives his very different account – he resigned from the National in 1976, – and indeed several other Associates were later – or earlier to strongly criticise Hall.

Of course, theatre lovers and those with some background or history here will be particularly gripped by this wonderfully warm, intelligent account, but it also provides fascinating insights into the kind of high, dramatic boardroom backstabbing events which almost have a Greek Tragedy – and Comedy feel, about them. Perhaps it is the lens of theatre itself which reveals this – so as Blakemore uncovers the workings of the rehearsal room, in his accounts of some of the productions he directed whilst at the National, what might be boring accounts of jockeyings for power and control seem to achieve a more mythic, archetypal painting

I recently re-read Next Season, so I knew that Blakemore would be fascinating in this one – and am now waiting to read Arguments with England, his account of his beginnings in the English theatre. He arrived from his native Australia in 1950, as a student at RADA

I had a clear and very simple view of what I thought theatre was for. It was to bring to the stage productions of such accomplishment and concentrated intent that anyone who saw them would remember them for the rest of their lives. It was their impact rather than the categories to which they happened to belong that mattered.

They could be anything – tragedies or comedies, musicals or one-man shows. Not surprisingly such occasions are a rarity. But they do happen and are perhaps the one good reason why people who should know better persist on in such a clumsy, compromised and often disappointing medium, It’s impossible to legislate for this kind of excellence; all you can do is get the work done as best you can, keep your fingers crossed and trust that once in a while in the life of an institution or an individual, against the odds, it happens. This hardly constitutes a policy and is certainly not a programme, nor is it much use in the daily and arduous demands of running a theatre, but as a thought on hold at the back of one’s mind, a sleeping aspiration, it can warn against wrong turnings and highlight misjudgements

Stage Blood UK
Stage Blood USA

Lucy Mangan – Bookworm : A Memoir of Childhood Reading

Tags

Book Review, Books about Books, Bookworm, Children's Books, Humour, Lucy Mangan

Lucy Mangan leads readers through a long distance reading journey with map, compass and excellent orienteering skills

Oh heavens, I didn’t want to get to Journey’s End, I really didn’t. This is an utterly delicious romp up hill and down dale through a childhood’s (Lucy’s) adventures between the covers of books.

Now Lucy was born in the 70s. She is not of my generation, so some of her childhood reads were certainly books I had never heard of, never mind read, but I just didn’t care, and chomped up, with equal delight, travels through books known and unknown. She also details experiences (as an adult I assume) with the whole history of childhood reading, indeed the production, the when and the why, of books written for children, whether, as in the high Victorian era, to morally educate and save young souls from temptation, or, – revolutionary, to entertain, to open up worlds, to surrender to with blazing delight.

IF you are a lifelong reader, IF you fell upon being read to with feverish delight and anticipation, but BURNED to take control of this for yourself, IF you still half regret the loss of that falling-in-love with reading, a kind of entrance into Paradise, DO NOT WAIT A MOMENT LONGER – you must have this book, you must read it, like you must draw breath.

This is an utterly joyous journey through the literature of childhood, from the earliest days of putting strange shaped squiggles together and suddenly grasping that c a t (for example) meant something – well, I guess that moment is equal to the moment serious greybeards first began to decode hieroglyphs.

Magic, that’s what

But Mangan is not only a wonderful chronicler of literature for children (the academic analysis) she is brilliantly right there within the experience of the exposure at the time of a child’s reading. She writes with as much joy and gusto as she reads

Pointless to describe the waystations on her journey, but this book is as much to be filed in Humour (she is one gloriously witty woman) as it is in Biography or factual tome about the history of children’s literature

Rarely has a book simultaneously made me laugh out loud so much whilst also educating me

Suffice it to say, Mangan had me, firmly following her guided tour, from this, early comment

Was your first crush on Dickon instead of Johnny Depp? Do you still get the urge to tap the back of a wardrobe if you find yourself alone in a strange bedroom

To which I could only shout YES! YES! Even if Johnny Depp was not yet a crushable entity when I first ‘crushed’ Dickon

Photograph by Romain Veillon from his book Ask the Dust

I was delighted to be offered this as a review copy as a digital ARC, and, have discovered to my delight that Mangan has written other books. WHICH I SHALL BE BUYING.

My only cavil (and I don’t know whether this was purely ‘digital ARC challenge’ or not) is that the author’s delightful habit of footnote and footnote within footnote asides does not work well in the digital format. It would work perfectly on a printed page, where the visual signs of long footnotes can happily spill over several pages without reader confusion.

Bookworm UK
Bookworm USA

Rebecca Solnit – Men Explain Things To Me : And Other Essays

Tags

Book Review, Feminism, Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit

‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’ for the Twenty-First Century

I have adored Rebecca Solnit’s writing since I found her wonderful book exploring an activity almost all of us do, or have done, and take for granted, though some of us have a passion for it – walking.  Her book Wanderlust, A History of Walking showed what a fine, broad, interesting mind she has, exploring the biology and evolution of walking, the development  of walking for pleasure instead of necessity, cultural attitudes to walking, the sexual politics of walking, walking as resistance and political action, and much much more.

So I knew I was going to be absorbed, educated, enlightened angered and amused by Men Explain Things To Me and Other Essays, a collection of investigations into various aspects of the relationship between men and women, and into the workings of a society which has clearly shown of late how far we still have to go

In the first, title essay, Solnit looks at ‘mansplaining’ though she doesn’t use the term with a wince-worthy encounter with someone who clearly was all mouth and no ears.

The Longest War explores the dark subject of rape.

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender

Worlds collide in a Luxury Suite takes the issue of power and domination into the relationship between capitalism, the IMF, and the way the developing world has been exploited and held back. She links this story with the personal one of Dominique Strauss-Kahn formerly head of the IMF, and the African chambermaid he was charged with assaulting

In Praise of the Threat looks at the changing history of marriage, and how same-sex marriage, without the historic inequalities of marriage between the sexes, metaphysically may make for a recognition that a marriage should be between equals. Which is not what marriage has traditionally been.

Grandmother Spider examines the invisibility of women within much genealogy. Look at the Bible, as example. All those begats, almost all men. Where are the daughters in  the list, where the mothers?

Fathers have sons and grandsons and so the lineage goes, with the name passed on; the tree branches, and the longer it goes on the more people are missing: sisters, aunts, mothers, grandmothers, great-grand-mothers, a vast population made to disappear on paper and in history

Woolf’s Darkness is a celebration of Virginia Woolf, and her willingness to face the darkness – her own and the world’s, and to engage with the mysteriousness of life, and the not-knowing. This is probably the most poetic of the essays. By which I mean that it takes the reader, by flash of unknown and surprising juxtapositions, as poetry does, into seeing the non-linear nature of our lives

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognise that we don’t. Sometimes I think these pretences at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation

Pandora’s Box and the Volunteer Police Force is a celebration of feminism, which, as Solnit points out is not just about changing women’s lives for the better. We (men and women) are on a journey here

Feminism is an endeavour to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, Innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth – and in our minds, where it all begins and end”

“I think the future of something we may no longer call feminism must include a deeper inquiry into men. Feminism sought and seeks to change the whole human world; many men are on board with the project, but how it benefits men, and in what ways the status quo damages men as well, could bear far more thought

Thought provoking, articulate, beautifully written; thoroughly recommended

Men Explain Things To Me UK
Men Explain Things To Me USA

Mandy Aftel – Fragrant – The Secret Life of Scent

Tags

Book Review, Fragrant, Mandy Aftel, Perfumery, The Secret Life Of Scent

Synaesthetic descriptions of perfumed delight

I am filled with admiration for Mandy Aftel’s writing about perfumery. Although a beautiful book to handle and read in ‘real’ form, with its thicker than normal, creamy coloured paper, beautiful, often archaic line drawings, and shiny, alluring woodcut/embossed type red cover, this is not a coffee table book. Rather, I would say Aftel is inviting you into imaginative, creative journeys of your own, those line drawings rather stirring the senses, connecting the reader to an old, but living history, in a way which artfully arranged, sumptuous colour photos of perfume bottles and ingredients could never do.

Aftel shows herself to have style and she shows herself to have substance.

Originally, Mandy Aftel, a highly respected American Artisan perfumer, was a psychotherapist, and what really appeals to me in her fascinating books is the reverse of the pile em high, whack em out ephemeral approach to instaperfume fashion. What insinuates from her books is relationship, a kind of development and connection which comes from the fact that she works with natural materials.

Fragrant, divided into 6 chapters, 5 of which place a particular plant and the fragrant material it produces, centre stage is an invitation to journey in time and in space with the material itself, and those who have tended it, prized it, grown it, harvested it, worked with it, transported it, thought about it and worn it.

There is something very special about a perfume from natural ingredients only. Firstly, it can never be standardised, and for some of us, that is a major part of its allure. The plant an essential oil or absolute may have been extracted from will have been a living, responsive entity. A batch of essential oil bought from this supplier, this year, from this place, will be somewhat different from the batch bought from the same supplier, from the same grower, last year, as the plant will be producing subtly varying chemistry, in response to this year’s changed growing conditions.

We might expect sumptious perfumes to have some of this

Aftel’s book invites reflection. Her major star playing aromatics, each of which indicates different facets about our relationship with aromatics, are Cinnamon (the once, highly exotic, call to adventure and the spice trade) Mint (home, the familiar, the cottage garden, the everyday – home) Frankincense, (the search to transcend, to interconnect, to find spirit) Ambergris (the frankly weird, a vomited up exudate from sperm whales, acted on by wind, water wave, sun to, if the finder is lucky, turn to monetary gold) and finally, Jasmine (the gorgeous, the provocative, the sensuous delight) Around these star players are others, and, also instructions to encourage the fragrantly curious to experiment, to source, to make your own.

£7000 worth of beachcombed dried whale vomit is a bit more surprising!

A bibliography invites further fragrant journeys, too

I also recommend her Essence and Alchemy which I reviewed last year

Oh lucky Statesiders, Aftel runs courses. She also will design you a bespoke perfume, but it must be done face to face – she leads you snuffling through her treasure chest of aromatics. She does also retail her existing perfume range, at reasonable prices (unlike the bespokes, which of course are a unique creation for a single user) Alas, I would have loved to purchase small samples of her existing perfumes, but shipping costs to the UK are savage. Not to mention our Brexited weak and wibbly pound

Go explore her website

Fragrant Amazon UK
Fragrant Amazon USA

Carol Dyhouse – Heartthrobs

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Book Review, Carol Dyhouse, Heartthrobs

Sardonic, sneering, wealthy, and wearing immaculate linen. Preferably ruffled.

Carol Dyhouse’s Heartthrobs, A History of Women and Desire, looking at the possibly changing faces of masculine desirability, as expressed in literature, film and pop culture is interesting, though I’m not certain it is really saying anything particularly new. She certainly backs up what she chooses to say by reference to much other material. Heartthrobs is 190 pages, plus a full 50 pages of cited references plus 7 of index.

Tracing the changing views of sexy, desirable men, from the earliest of novels (whether written by men, or particularly, women) we are shown that, whether in Richardson’s Pamela, the first novel, Austen’s novels, (especially Pride and Prejudice, with Darcy, the pinnacle of desirability) or Bronte’s, what set female hearts a flutter was a dominant, dominating, often ‘sardonic’ (a favourite adjective) on the verge of cruel, man, ultimately to be tamed, reformed in some way by the virtuous love of a good woman. Love tames the beast into marriage. And, rescuing him from being merely bestial, was of course, wealth. Easy to see why, in a time when a woman’s ability to make wealth for herself was lacking. So it is a little depressing to see how little has changed….she reminds the reader of a more than on the verge of cruel man in that runaway viral success, 50 Shades of Grey. What of course stopped the – I can’t bring myself to name him hero – of that, from merely being a thug, was – (sighs) wealth and fine linen denoting wealth, rather than grubby grease stained overalls.

Rudolph Valentino and Vilma Banky, throbbing

Others, in films, followed the trend, from Valentino to Rhett Butler. I found it interesting, and, depressing too, as explained with Valentino (The Sheik) though his Arabian mien is exotic, and in part gives his allure, it was necessary that the character turned out to have Caucasian ancestry – there was, surely, an inherent racism in this.

Later sections in the book look at sexual desire in early teens and pre-teens, and examines the pretty boy/boy band phenomenon – David Cassidy is particularly focused on – the allure for his young fans his unthreatening, androgynous, not quite developed sexuality. It’s the other end of the spectrum from the adult female’s object of desire who masters.

Unknown man wearing a fine linen shirt. Not many ruffles though.

There are some amusing anecdotes – I particularly enjoyed the revelation of the potency of Austen’s Darcy – perhaps not unconnected with Colin Firth’s wet shirt, but, of course, P+P was an enduring literary romance before THAT BBC adaptation – as evidenced by the following quote :

scientists working on pheromones in mice discovered a protein in the urine of the male mouse which was irresistible to females. They named it after Jane Austen’s character.’Darcin’. There are many ways in which Darcy has proved a money spinner

I received this from Amazon Vine UK, as a review copy. The text also has some great black and white illustrations showing the changing appearance of ‘throbs’ (and melting women) though these are done as text page pictures, rather than photos. There are some wonderful illustrations from ‘Romance Magazines/stories from early in the twentieth century, and pin-ups of the nineteenth century – portraits of Nelson and Wellington (!).

It is available as wood book and digital download in the UK, but Stateside, though available on Kindle does not get published in hard copy till next month

Heartthrobs Amazon UK
Heartthrobs Amazon USA

Mandy Aftel – Essence and Alchemy

Tags

Book Review, Essence and Alchemy, Mandy Aftel, Natural Perfumery, Perfumery

Writing on perfume so fine and evocative I could smell the accords in imagination!

Aftel’s book is a delight, to all who might be interested in perfumery, the mysteries of olfaction, and, particularly how psyche and aroma connect. Her book is far from a leaf through, light on substance pretty picture coffee table book. Instead, dense and engagingly written text, lightened and deepened by beautiful line drawings – which are actually so much more satisfying (for this reader) than the usual photographer and bottles of perfume artfully arranged number.

There is something enormously pleasing about the original slow work involved in making, for example, botanical line drawings, woodcuts and the like, which are then here reproduced.

Aftel is a fascinating writer, too. Originally a psychotherapist she brings that listening delight to teasing out the useful story of ‘the other’ the uncovering of hidden meaning, to the way she sees her present vocation – perfumer. And, her interest is in natural perfumes, rather than those of novel synthesised chemistry created in a lab.

Those of us who are pulled, for many reasons, by perfume using plants, know that this is slow, reflective perfumery. At its best we are drawn into a realisation of the complexity of growing the plants, of extractions to yield their aromatics, of a weight of history behind them

And Aftel brings all this along with her in her book, connecting ‘’Per fumem” to its original, sacred roots, and the making of perfume from extracting essential oils from plants to an original pairing with alchemy.

                   C. Gesner, The newe jewell of health

Along the way as well as philosophical, psychological and historical reflections, there is much practical information for the budding kitchen perfumer, including methods, aromatic suggestions, information about what will harmoniously marry with what, and what might connect with interesting, piquant oppositions.

This is a book to enjoyably read and re-read – not to mention, embark on given formulations and sail out on one’s own to assay others.

                          Enfleurage, in times of yore

The book concludes with a list of potential suppliers, though as this was originally published in 2001 I note some of the listed suppliers have long disembarked from their perfumed barges and vanished into the wild blue yonder,

 

There is also an extensive bibliography and reference section, to take the eager reader onwards into further aromatic journeys, be these deeper into an exploration of alchemy, or neurobiology and olfaction, or, even weighty tomes exploring the history and design of perfume bottles!

This is very much a deep, broad, wide read on the subject, but beckoning the lured reader on the further exploration

Essence and Alchemy Amazon UK
Essence and Alchemy Amazon USA

Beverley Nichols – Cats’ A.B.C.

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Beverley Nichols, Book Review, Cats, Cats' A.B.C., Humour and Wit

Frolicsome, fantastic, feline frivolity

A chance mention of a Beverley Nichols book on gardens and gardening by a book blogger (thank you Karen) sent me scurrying to my bookshelves to find Nichol’s ABC of Cats, bought for me as a child – though Nichols writing style is anything but childish – by a family friend, who had a slightly waspish and fastidious nature, and didn’t really like cats – or children. He did at least have the generosity to realise the child I was had an enthusiasm for good writing, which ought to be encouraged, and that despite the fact that Nichols was expressing a lot of distaste for children in these pages (with a tongue I hope at least marginally in cheek) his veneration of cats, and approval of those who he regarded as ‘true Fs’ (feline lovers) would meet with my regard. As indeed it did.

So it was with great delight that I re-opened the well battered, oft read, delightfully illustrated – line drawings by Derreck Sayer – Cats’ ABC. With short, letters of the alphabet chapter headings, running from such important subjects as A for Amusements

Let us take as a simple example the familiar device of a length of string to which we attach a screwed-up piece of paper, in order to simulate a mouse. A regrettably large proportion of cat-owners, having manufactured this elementary form of diversion, seem to imagine that nothing remains to be done but to drag the string languidly across the carpet, giving it an occasional twitch, while the cat or kitten leaps and pounces and cavorts in its wake

This is surely the most stingy and unimaginative behaviour; it is totally lacking in drama, and drama is the essence of all feline diversions

to Z for ….

Z stands for…Whatever else we may decide that Z stands for, it does not stand for Zoos. This is a book in which no institution so miserable as a Zoo should play any part. I am totally unable to understand the general public’s attitude to Zoos

with many delightful staging posts in-between. Nichols’  aura is remarkably patrician and has definite sharpness and sting, a marvellous foil to his whimsicality. There is at times an acidity and definite wasp – the reiteration of ‘their horrible children’ though babes appear to escape disfavour somewhat – but his moues of perhaps slightly affected campness are not malicious.

I like to imagine that if I, as a small child, had smeared chocolate stained fingers over the Ming, that my obvious respectful adoration of kitten-and-cat, and my instinctive awareness that any feline should be approached softly and patiently, would have led to Nichols regarding me as ‘needs some improvement, shows promise’ as he summoned Gaskin-the-butler to clean the offending smears off the priceless porcelain, which at least I had had the delicacy and appreciation not to break

Following, mainly the lives, loves and loathings of his three-in-residence, Four, Five and Oscar, affectionate attention is also given to the very lamented Siamese, One, who, for very sad reasons darkens the entry on G for Gardening – one of Nichols other passions, which inspires his writing.

The G chapter made me cry, though he was recounting an event which must have happened nearly 75 years ago, given this book’s publication date.

Other chapters are far happier.

A wonderful divertissement. Cats a springboard to take in other important matters like music (classical) and art.

Beverley and Leo

To my delight I have also discovered he wrote another, similar tome, again with illustrations by Sayer. Which the postie has just delivered, as I sourced a beautifully preserved copy, at reasonable price, from a market place seller. PURR!

Cats’ A.B.C. Amazon UK
Cats’ A.B.C. Amazon USA

The UK edition I have linked is the Paperback One, which seems more readily available at reasonable price, and new, than the hardback. which I have

And, not at all in the spirit of Nichols book, as it is distinctly made to satisfy the non-Fs among us, rather than the Fs, but still too amusing to miss