In Which I Grow Heated

Scene: A gender diversity workshop

Topic: Mentoring women

Workshop attendee: But I don’t understand why it is more important to mentor women than it is to mentor men.

Charlotte: Because men have been mentoring each other for 2000 years. It’s called the patriarchy!

Three Reasons Why I Love Germany

Reason number one:

 

Reason number 2:

Police help a mother duck and her 10 ducklings to cross a motorway.

Reason number 3:

I love diversity, ducklings and great soul singers – best of all, I’m off to see her in two days’ time!

 

Blog Hiatus

Dear Fans of Charlotte’s Web,

I am going on holiday and will be off the grid for a few weeks.

I plan to be here:

The Bush

And here:

The Beach

 

See you on the other side!

Love,
World Traveller

Pictures for Women’s Day, 8 March 2012

I’ve written words about International Women’s Day here and here.

This time, I made a mood board on Pinterest instead. I looked for images that didn’t include:

• nakedness
• waifs
• nubile women
• women laughing alone with salad
• women missing their mouths while drinking water
• women as backdrop to a product
• hardbodied women
• women sweating while wearing small amounts of clothing
• women as body parts
• women in duets of romance with men
• women in wedding dresses

Instead I tried to look for

• happy women
• colourful women
• women in groups of friends
• women in art
• women in literature
• women in music
• inspiring photos of women
• women who fought for us
• bold words about being a woman
• women from all over the world
• women from long ago

And here is my Pinterest board to celebrate International Women’s Day 2012: Women

Hope you enjoy it.

All Hail the Queen

No, not that one. This one. Queen Emily has called upon me and thus, as a loyal subject, I must respond forthwith.

I give you Emily’s Eleven Questions Meme:

1. Have you ever liked a movie more than the book? If so, what movie(s)? 

Never. Not once. Not ever. Books rule. Books win. Books are the best.

2. ________ opening for __________ would be a dream concert. Fill in the blanks. (You can fill them in with performers dead or alive.)

Ivy Quainoo opening for Florence and the Machine would be a dream concert.

3. If you’re making dinner and don’t need to take into account anyone else’s tastes but your own, what do you find yourself having over and over again?

Salad, or eggs with salad. I get very boring when I cook for myself.

4. You get to interview the author of the book you are reading right now. What’s the first question you’d ask?

I’m reading the latest Elizabeth George. I’d like to know why she killed off Lynley’s wife. Was it really necessary? My second question would be, ‘And now would you read my book?’

5. If the world becomes one in which all new novels are only published in digital format, what will you miss most?

The thrill of the bookshop hunt. I have strong physical memories of many of the bookshops I have visited over the years and it would leave a vast gaping hole in my life if they were no more.

6. If you had been gifted to play any musical instrument brilliantly, what would you choose to play? (Or maybe you are so-gifted. If so, what do you play?)

I have no gift to speak of, but would adore to play the piano. Need I say that all three of my children take piano lessons?

7. The “war between the sexes” has been around since the beginning of time. What do you think is the biggest problem between the sexes today?

Misogyny amongst young men. It makes me fear for younger women. I happen to listen to a radio station that plays a lot of rap, and the misogyny and hatred of women that pours out of those lyrics is appalling. But also infantile in a way – lots of little babies all trying to get boobies. Really pathetic. Perhaps I should stop listening, but I can’t help myself because I’m so incredulous at the level of awfulness.

8. If you could switch places with any celebrity for three months, with whom would you like to switch places?

Lionel Shriver (a celebrity to me). Three months in her skin would teach me how to write.

9. You can eat at any restaurant in the world. Where would you eat?

I’d go to Lookout Beach in Plett for a bucket of prawns and a cider – and if they could order some whales in for me to watch at the same time, that would be perfect.

10. What book do you wish you hadn’t wasted your time reading last year?

Oh dear, now I have to come clean that I never manage to finish A Stranger’s Child: the first half was so brilliant it had me swooning and quoting bits and writing blog posts, and the second was …. a snore.

11. Would you like me to answer all these questions myself?

Absolutely, Queenie. You go for it girlfriend.

Emily will forgive me if I don’t invent 11 questions and tag 11 people. Firstly, her questions were so good, I couldn’t beat them and secondly I don’t do tagging any more.

However, if you want to play, the Queen would be thrilled!

(Apologies for the strange formatting in this post – I have novel revisions to do and don’t have time to fiddle with the code.)

A Smorgasbord of Reading

I’ve been gobbling up The Hunger Games trilogy in tandem with my two daughters (they’re reading it in German) and while many of the scenes are incredibly moving, there were no parts of the books I needed to reread for the beauty of the words. Collins is brilliant at plot and she has a cast of memorable characters, led by the inimitable Katniss (such a superstar heroine compared to the dweeb who MC-ed Twilight, name utterly forgotten). I have images in my mind from the novels, whole scenes washing around in my head, but no words. Collins is a world-builder, a plotter and an ace at character, but perhaps not a poet.

The second book I’ve bounced through this week is the much-awaited (by me) The Obamas by Jodi Kantor. Longterm blog readers will know that I was an averred Obama fan. I howled big salty tears at his inauguration, had his poster up in my office and even stopped highlighting my hair in solidarity with his peppery side-burns. Like many, I grew disillusioned with his apparent inability to ring the changes and rise above the bipartisan US politics as he promised the world he would. When we moved house, his poster was relegated to the garage.

The Obamas is a very reasoned attempt to explain why this disillusionment happened for so many, how much it frustrated the first couple and how hard they are both still working to bring changes that will make differences in ordinary people’s lives. My respect for him was largely restored (though Guantanamo and the treatment of Bradley Manning are still blemishes), and my respect for Michelle Obama is hugely increased. I read The Obamas for facts and for the insight of Jodi Kantor, a journalist who followed them closely for years and interviewed hundreds of people for the book. It was engrossing, but dry.

Now I’m doing a third kind of reading. I’m late to the party with Lorrie Moore’s A Gate At The Stairs and I knew in advance that I was likely to enjoy it, given the many glowing reviews. But I had no idea how much. Moore is in love with language. She delights in great sentences and I am having to read some of them twice or three times just for the fun, the lightness, the poetry that they offer. Here is one where the main character describes the mosquitoes on her parents’ farm:

Mosquitoes with tiger-striped bodies and the feathery beards of an iris, their wings and legs the dun wisps of an unbarbered boy, their spindly legs the tendrils of an orchid, the blades of a gnome’s sleigh.

And here’s a great pair about the strangeness of coming home after having left for university:

At home in Dellacrosse my place in the world of college and Troy and incipient adulthood dissolved and I became an unseemly collection of jostling former selves. Snarkiness streaked through my voice, or sullenness drove me behind a closed door for hours at a time.

I’m only 63 pages in, so I have a lot of great sentences ahead of me. Sigh! What a lucky, lucky reader I am. I can tell that Lorrie Moore is about to be put on the list of favourites and her back-list hunted out.

To use my husband’s favourite software analogy, reading The Hunger Games is like eating popcorn (light, fluffy, but oddly compelling), reading The Obamas is like eating broccoli (healthy and enlightening), but reading A Gate At The Stairs is like eating the perfect meal at the perfect moment with the perfect person. It’s apt. It’s delicious. And it’s memorable.

The Rooftops of Germany

… are sprinkled with fairy dust:

Isn’t life pretty today?

(View from my writing corner.)