Little ticky boxes

Things I have achieved in the last week:

• Drove up to Sydney to see Vise and Consent (agh, spelling!), which was a BDSM 101 movie that was interesting food for thought. They could have left out the craptacular artwork though; the interviews were good.
• Caught up with felix_femme and grey_evil_twin while I was there. Lovely peoples, yay. And it's fun getting goss.
• Found great coffee at Campos, on Missenden St, just off King St. If anyone can explain to me why they close at bloody 4pm on weekdays, I'd be grateful. How stupid. And where is their web page? Mind you, they don't seem to need advertising. It was packed out at 10am on Thursday.
• Went along to a doctor that saluqi and faxon recommended, who was a great guy, and recommended me for an MRI instantly.
• Went and got the MRI done, and got the films back today. I have a degenerative tear of the body of the lateral meniscus with a small multilocated parameniscal cyst. I'm not sure about the "degenerative" part, since I know when I screwed my knee (heavy fall onto uneven pavement), but nemmind. It's really wierd, but I feel relieved that there is actually something wrong there. I'm not a hypochondriac, but I'm not used to something going on for so long... I was almost convincing myself I was making something out of nothing. Well, yay. Off to the doc tomorrow again to see what treatment options there are.
• Helped saluqi hunt and gather some gardening materials for the organic vege garden that she and her Bear are putting in their backyard. Also provided a shopping list of things to get for the aforementioned garden, which saluqi has well under control. Looking forward to D[ig]-Day this weekend.
• Finally pinned down the OGF for a night away somewhere - weekend after next. About bloody time; here's hoping nothing comes up to get in the way of our plans (such as they are right now).
• Had a few bloody nice hours with the CDL yesterday afternoon. Man, I'm so fortunate with the cool people in my life. :-D

Book report

I loathed writing book reports at school. Despite my love of reading and the English language, I detested English as a subject. Mainly because I don't like being told what to read. 7th Form English was ok because we had a teacher who let us choose our own texts (with her approval). Shame I kept bunking off because my first girlfriend was also in the same English class, and the double-English period before lunch was just too good to waste on study. I'm amazed I got Bursary English, actually. Possibly even in the high 70s for a mark, I don't quite recall. < /ramble>

I've been immersing myself in the Belle Époque these last few days, after having spent quite a bit of dosh on books while I was in Sydney, one of which being a marvellous large format 400-page glossy book on Art Nouveau. I re-read The Ladies' Almanack by Djuna Barnes (that link is to the full text, with illustrations), and I also bought Wild Girls by Diana Souhami (who wrote Gertrude and Alice).

Wild Girls is a biography-of-sorts, featuring "the lives and loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks". I've had a historical crush on Natalie Barney forever (she features in The Ladies' Almanack as "Evangeline Musset"), and Romaine Brooks, well, I like some of her paintings. Both Barney and Brooks were born in the US, and spent their adult lives in Europe. Natalie Barney lived in Paris for over 60 years, hosted famous artistic salons which were de rigeur for well-to-do lesbians passing through Europe,  wrote some fairly indifferent poetry (her epigrams were a bit more noteworthy) and she had affairs with scores of women, right into her 80s. My favorite quote of hers is: "People call it unnatural. All I can say is that it came quite naturally to me". Romaine Brooks got married, quickly separated, had some affairs, mainly with women, painted some quite interesting paintings, and spent most of the time angsting and espousing Fascism as a wonderful ideal. In fact her whole life can be summed up by the term emoooooooo. She and Barney had a non-monogamous relationship for over 50 years - they only lived together for 6 months during WWII.

So, the book. It gives a fairly decent view of Natalie Barney bouncily pursuing her many many loves, while Romaine Brooks glumly paints somewhere - or not - and angsts about Natalie's latest paramour, and then plays hard-to-get while Natalie begs to be allowed to spend time with her. What worked for them, I suppose. It's laboriously researched, and the author seems to have been a tad fascinated with the web as a primary source. It's useful for displaying obscure works, it must be said. It is written in a bare kind of way, like a protracted gossip session. There's a wee bit of wry humour, but I was massively put off by the author's inclusion of pretentious little vignettes from her own life at intervals. The reason:

Actual letters, paintings, houses and hillsides, prompt keener connections than this virtual reality on screen, and reading rooms with real manuscripts are a spur to application. But real people can be distracting -- the Proust scholar who chuckles oddly, the heavy-breathing medievalist. ...
Interruptions, quirky and unpredictable, merge with, or divert from, the main theme as do the brief discursions that intersperse this Sapphic idyll. These discursions disconcert me, and perhaps any reader. ... I kept taking them out, ... then putting them back because, in some uncertain way, they seemed to connect to the task at hand.

As an example of one of these "discursions" (immediately preceding the chapter that talks about Romaine and Natalie living together briefly in Italy):

When your ceiling fell in and you moved, out of convenience, into my small flat, we managed all right for many months. We were happy living together and watching carnage on television. I supposed it was like being married. I was sad when you left, but glad to have back silence, loneliness, and again to feel free to stew my own apples.

Yeah, wtfevah.  Speaking for myself, this reader isn't so much "disconcerted" as peeved. Out would have been much better than in. I take her point, about our reading matter sparking echoes in our own lives, and the distractions to our thought processes that they provoke. But frankly, I'd rather come up with my own associations than read through some complete stranger's not very interesting ones.

So I give it 3 out of 5, with a whole point off for pointless discursions. The other point is off for the clunky, repetitive style in general. Yes, Una Troubridge reckoned Barney picked up lovers in the women's restrooms in department stores. Repeating that bon mot would have been sufficient just once, not three times. And nearly all of the stupid footnotes could go. It's not all bad - the research is worth a bit, there are some nice anecdotes and the book does fill in a few gaps that you don't quite cover when reading the respective biogs.

ETA: The Amazon page has quoted a very apt review from Publishers Weekly, and the two user comments there are also pretty spot-on.

But here's another good Barney quote to finish up on:

I am a lesbian. One need not hide it, nor boast of it, though being other than normal is a perilous advantage.