We have had two solid days of solid sunshine! It’s like a collective menopause. This is unusually warm for September. It’s very strange with the nights drawing in much earlier — darkness — and to concurrently have this heat.<\/p>\n
Today I was alerted by a friend to “fog” to the West, which turned out, on inquiry, to be Marine Cloud Cover<\/strong> caused by fog and stratus that travelled up from California. (Thanks Johanna Wagstaffe CBC weather genius for educating me on this).<\/p>\n Pretty soon I am off on the road again to a few festivals, where the climate is bound to be much colder. I am curious to see whether this warm spell endures. Will we as usual need to turn the heat on in October?<\/p>\n What is happening with your weather? Are you also having a warm patch ? Report in the comments.<\/p>\n I’m off to find a humidifier.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n I was reading A Far Cry From Kensington in my Sparkist revisit. Muriel Spark reminds me of Beryl Bainbridge in her depiction of post-war Britain. I have to say I have cried off A Far Cry … because I didn’t understand why she took the narrative into publishing, publishing people, instead of staying with Wanda, the Polish seamstress. (*I did find her who gets a job part salient) However I find much to contemplate in her early depiction of Wanda and Millie. There’s something timeless about it. The struggle, landing up in a country, trying to find work, struggling, inventing and settling on work that may be far from what you did back home, but a survival nonetheless. This applies less to Wanda and more to some of the people I met on my recent trip to England and knew during my many years living there. Wanda has endured because Spark imbued her with anxiety and humility rather than just being a talking head to serve a plot line or a larger theme. My next stop on the Spark shelf will be The Comforters.<\/p>\n On the other line: I am reading Chris Kraus Summer of Hate. There’s an excellent paragraph where she sums up who reads her books (and perhaps acknowledges the dilutionists she has also spawned). I am glad to have read the book for that paragraph, however I may also be churning to a stop with it. I can’t get beyond the fact that Michele Bernstein was doing something similar 50 years ago and she was doing it in a more engaging literary manner. The prose in Summer of Hate is a tad leaden and plunky. Even though her meta-real estate dabbling is intriguing. Kraus is funny in a clipped way which I appreciate. For now we go on, mostly for the sake of thinking about the leaden line both on the page and the continuum of the line she’s treading. I want to consider how or whether any solid aesthetic has emerged since Bernstein with this work. (Bernstein’s second novel has only just been translated to English) I waver on whether it’s a “can’t be arsed” school of transcription we’ve come to now or has some anchor that I am swimming blindly past in my reading.<\/p>\n What matters is the thinking, more so than the conclusion, since conclusions can change and evolve.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We have had two solid days of solid sunshine! It’s like a collective menopause. This is unusually warm for September. It’s very strange with the nights drawing in much earlier — darkness — and to concurrently have this heat. Today I was alerted by a friend to “fog” to the West, which turned out, on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}