The Ghost of Christmas Past, Hilary Mantel, Aubrey Beardsley, Mince Pies

London is as freezing as Boston but it's wonderful to be back home seeing family and friends. There's also a mist lurking outside which makes me think of Dickens' The Ghost Of Christmas Past.
Having just about finished my present-shopping, I snuggled up and dug into the papers. I forgot how much I missed my British supplements. The articles and columns are so much more irreverent than in the States which is so refreshing and makes me feel even more at home.
As always, I feel compelled to make note of a few of them.
A) In The Review section of The Guardian (Sat 22.12.07) there was a fantastic commentary by Hilary Mantel arguing that "Journalism is as fast as the turnover in Topshop, but fiction should be couture." She starts by quoting Martin Amis, "who was pondering the balance that writers seek between journalism and fiction. "I think of writing journalism and criticism as writing left-handed," Amis said, "where the connection isn't to the part of me that novels come from."" I particularly liked the last paragraph of Mantel's article: "Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths. It multiplies ambiguity. It's about the particular, which suggests the general: about inner meaning, seen with the inner eye, always glimpsed, always vanishing, always more or less baffling, and scuffled on to the page hesitantly, furtively, transgressively..."
B) In The Guardian Weekend magazine (22.12.07) there was a very moving, raw excerpt about old age by Diana Athill from her memoir Somewhere Towards The End, to be published by Granta next month. In this magazine there was also a profile of Tang Wei, the upcoming star of Ang Lee's acclaimed new erotic thriller, 'Lust, Caution' which I look forward to seeing. To quote the article: "Lee says the film is a companion piece to Brokeback Mountain. "That was about a lost paradise," he says, "and this is more like hell.""
C) In Times 2 (Nov 27 07), there was a fascinating article by Rachel Campbell-Johnston previewing The Age of Enchantment: Beardsley, Dulac and their contemporaries at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. The subheading reads "A new exhibition reveals how the erotic images from the imagination of Aubrey Beardsley were soon diluted into the tamer fantasies of children's fairytales," and the article goes on to describe how "at their strongest, the works in this show draw you ever more deeply into a peculiar imaginative place...Some have an almost dizzying force... The balance shifts from the disturbing to the decorative, the perverse to the pretty, the erotic to the merely coquettish... And all we can do is look back slightly giddily at that wierd world we have just walked through, and wonder."
It's dark outside now. I'm off upstairs for some tea and mincepies.
Merry Christmas!