The end of a dying month: August megrims

[flemmings]

Why do I read Peter Ackroyd? Why? He gives me the fantods. But I keep on reading him, as I do not keep on reading Chatwin's equally fantoddy Viceroy of Ouidah. The 80s were very good to me but I look back on its literature, the stuff I read then and mostly in Picador, and have claustrophobic attacks.

Equally Kate Elliott posts a picture of Salisbury Plain. Which makes me understand, even more than the Niagara Peninsula, Auden's prayer:

I cannot see a plain without a shudder,
'Oh God, please, please don't ever make me live there.

More happily, a Star reporter talks about learning to ride a bicycle at age 23. I was 29 and thought that an achievement; I also had an easier time. Start by riding on grass? or worse, Queen St? Lord no. School playground on the weekend, third try. Friend held the handlebars till I had my feet on the pedals, let me go, and suddenly I was bicycling. (I didn't learn as a kid because my mom was convinced that to ride a bike was to die. Even if my dad had got his way and tried to teach us, I'd have been like the reporter: fall off once, forget it.)

But my hat is off to the Toronto Councillor who learned at 45. Go him.

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I think the only other Chatwin I've read was In Patagonia ages and ages back. There's something a bit oogey about a lot of travel writing. I first encountered it when I was reading up on Japan, and all the male travel writers never seemed talk about anything but themselves in the face of these amusingly different foreigners. Now I'm suspicious of the genre on principle.

[unearthly-calm.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's restricted to the men, but I take your point.
I really like William Dalrymple's books (City of Djinns for example) and I love Suketu Mehta's Maximum City because they both show me new ways of looking at cities I know well.
I found Holy Cow (written by an Australian woman in Delhi) completely off-putting at first (she is so very unapologetic about how much she hates India), but I came to appreciate her frankness.