Good News... Reviews!

Now that I'm comfortably back in ol' Partridge Green (providing you consider a room stuffed with cardboard boxes comfortable), I thought it was time to start putting content up on this here blog.  The past few days, I've been reading Tennyson's Gift, by Lynne Truss, and I've just finished.  But this won't just be any review, oh no.  This, dear friends, will be a review with pictures.

 

For example, I can only assume this was your reaction to the above.

I'll acknowledge from the beginning that Tennyson's Gift is hardly a classic.  Heck, I didn't even know it existed until it popped up in front of me one day.  Lynne Truss, of fame Eats, Shoots & Leaves, has written what can only be described as a historical farce.  Set on the Isle of Wight in 1863, Tennyson has set up home in Farringford, and just down the way lives Julia Margaret Cameron, pioneering photographer, desperate to have the Great Laurete sit for her.  At the same time, G.F. Watts, the painter, and his young wife, thespian Ellen Terry, come to stay with Cameron, and Charles Dodgson (known to you and I as Lewis Carroll), seeks Tennyson's blessing for a dedication at the opening of his debut childrens book.  Oh, and Lorenzo Fowler, along with his beastly daughter Jessie, are bringing their world-famous phrenology show to the island, throwing up plenty of discord on the way.

 

I must admit, he doesn't scream "comedy", does he?

Granted, it seems a strange plot, but it's truly made by its characters.  Tennyson's perfectionist persona makes for a bizarre and wonderful scene in which the choice between "peaches" and "pears" in Mariana is hotly contended, because life's hard for poets, Cameron has an astounding ability to give away wallpaper, and Dodgson's unique mind lands him in all sorts of hot water - not to mention the various unmissable allusions (and delusions) involving Alice in Wonderland.

 "They're just more poetic, damnit!"

These little details all come from a great depth of research into the characters Truss uses.  While it's certianly the case that they all lived on or visited the same part of the Isle in '63 (with the possible exception of the Fowlers), the plot of the book is entirely fictional.  The quirks and traits of the participants, on the other hand, are not.  Dodgson and Tennyson's traits are well recorded, but Truss really has gone the extra mile.  Emily, Tennyson's wife, is a minor character for the majority of the book, but everything she says or does correlates to how she is historically perceived to have been.  By that, I mean both Truss and I have copies of Ann Thwaite's comprehensive biography of Emily Tennyson on our shelves, but my point still stands.  Moreover, what she knows is used to fantastic comic effect in the end.  Emily's obsessive hiding of Alfred's reviews from his sight (she actually did this) leads to an unprecedented, yet entirely unforgettable, chapter involving apple pie.  I'll say no more.

 Ths bad boy'll throw a twist in yo' tale any day...

In the end, though, this is unfortunately both the book's making and breaking (not the apple pie, the depth of research).  On her own website, Truss acknowledges that the book didn't sell fantastically, and even provides a reason: "you should never put the name Tennyson in the title of a book and expect it to sell".  Sadly, she's right.  As a literary figure, Tennyson just hasn't been cool since Modernism happened.  For the past century, he's had a stale image; one of antiquity and misery (the latter of which he kind of deserves).  As such, anything that deals with him, let alone quotes quite extensively from Mariana, Maud, and other well known poems (albeit humerously) simply doesn't have the audience.  It's not a bad book, by any means - it pulls off the task of being both informative and funny at once quite exceptionally - but it's only ever likely to find a home in the hearts of a very special kind of bookworm: a sort that mostly got eaten up by bigger, scarier bookworms at the beginning of the 20th century.

 

"Our literature is tough, our lives are tougher!"

Photos courtesy of CarbonNYC, freeparking, S Baker, angieloves, and phelle.

You Say Goodbye, and I Say Hello

Is it a bird?  Is it a plane?  No, are you blind?  It's quite clearly a new blog.  Born from recommendation and subsequent coersion by several lovely people I count among my friends, I welcome you to the humble beginnings of Whalesong: my little place for rambling.  It's kind of like getting a packet of envelopes for your birthday - relatively unimpressive look at for now, but then you start to realise the potential.  You could use those envelopes to send letters to the Queen or something.  Not that Her Majesty's likely to read this, nor is it necessarily my intention to direct all future posts to her (for now), but you catch my drift.

With the arrival of new things, though, we wave goodbye to the old.  Some people are aware that I've had a blog before, this one, in fact, but look at the last time anything was posted there.  Over a year ago.  You could write and perform a play in that time, or take an entire undergraduate first year.  I should know, I've done both, and they were exceptionally fun.  To put the old blog into the new context my life has become would have been an awful lot of hassle, and that's not something I'm particularly keen on.  Besides, while I'm still interested in words their origins (I'm doing modules in it this year!), I felt there was much more I could/shouldn't write about, so I needed a bigger canvas.  That's what this is!

The old blog isn't the only thing I'm saying goodbye to, mind.  In that vast expanse of a year that's just gone by, I've made a lot of new friends.  We get on so well, as it goes, that two of them have decided to leave not only the country, but the entire continent.  They've made their excuses, "It's what I want", "I applied before we were good friends", or "I'm from America in the first place, I'm here on a study abroad programme", but they just don't fly.  Anway, thanks to technology, we're sure to stay in contact regardless.  Geography isn't a obstacle, it's a distal malfunction, or a proximity glitch.  A technicality, nothing more.  More fool my intercontinental chums, really.

So that's that: lots of exciting new things, and farwells, in some cases temporary, to others.  Still, there are plenty of "starting afresh" proverbs to justify the whole move, so it's all ok.  But enough of the goodbyes, what's there to say hello to?  There's plenty of interesting things that might happen in this blog now - I'm thinking reviews, musings, word origins ala old blog, and much, much more.  So, if you like reading the dense waffle of a reasonably unedited, unreasonably verbose mind... stay tuned!

TTFN!