Helena Bonham Carter Reading A Passage From Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 56


 She entered the room with an air more than usually ungracious, made no other reply to Elizabeth's salutation than a slight inclination of the head, and sat down without saying a word. Elizabeth had mentioned her name to her mother on her ladyship's entrance, though no request of introduction had been made.Mrs. Bennet, all amazement, though flattered by having a guest of such high importance, received her with the utmost politeness. After sitting for a moment in silence, she said very stiffly to Elizabeth,
``I hope you are well, Miss Bennet. That lady, I suppose, is your mother.''
Elizabeth replied very concisely that she was.
``And that I suppose is one of your sisters.''
``Yes, madam,'' said Mrs. Bennet, delighted to speak to a Lady Catherine. ``She is my youngest girl but one. My youngest of all is lately married, and my eldest is somewhere about the grounds, walking with a young man who, I believe, will soon become a part of the family.''
``You have a very small park here,'' returned Lady Catherine after a short silence.
``It is nothing in comparison of Rosings, my lady, I dare say; but I assure you it is much larger than Sir William Lucas's.''
``This must be a most inconvenient sitting room for the evening, in summer; the windows are full west.''
Mrs. Bennet assured her that they never sat there after dinner, and then added,
``May I take the liberty of asking your ladyship whether you left Mr. and Mrs. Collins well.''
``Yes, very well. I saw them the night before last.''
Elizabeth now expected that she would produce a letter for her from Charlotte, as it seemed the only probable motive for her calling. But no letter appeared, and she was completely puzzled.
Mrs. Bennet, with great civility, begged her ladyship to take some refreshment; but Lady Catherine very resolutely, and not very politely, declined eating any thing; and then, rising up, said toElizabeth,
``Miss Bennet, there seemed to be a prettyish kind of a little wilderness on one side of your lawn. I should be glad to take a turn in it, if you will favour me with your company.''
``Go, my dear,'' cried her mother, ``and shew her ladyship about the different walks. I think she will be pleased with the hermitage.''
Elizabeth obeyed, and running into her own room for her parasol, attended her noble guest down stairs. As they passed through the hall, Lady Catherine opened the doors into the dining-parlour anddrawing-room, and pronouncing them, after a short survey, to be decent looking rooms, walked on...

Weekend Reading List

I've been eating a lot of fine Chinese food over the Chinese New Year, and lots of yummy stuff cooked at home by mother, so pardon me as I leave a trail of drool as I stick my snout into the wonderful hawker food guide The End of Char Kway Teow and other Hawker Mysteries. It's by award-winning food blogger Dr Leslie Tay (ieatishootipost.sg) and it's gastroporn of the most delicious kind. Divided into chapters featuring all the heart-stopping Singapore street food like laksa, satay, rojak and other obsessions which I've not eaten in ages, it's a pretty definitive, opiniated, well-researched, guide including ratings and addresses and directions. I just want to tear downstairs and fly to the nearest hawker stand. Fortunately, the nearest one for me is Singapore's top biryani store (across the road); I don't like biryani, otherwise I'll be eating, not blogging.On a different note, I've been reading E M Forster's Collected Short Stories. They are queerly comforting, and read very much like period pieces. I didn't use to think so when I first discovered these in my 20s, but upon reading them again, I find that they feel anachronistic. It's truly a vanished world. Just downstairs, gay couples, with their Stussy T-shirts and sling bags, stroll in pairs of a Sunday morning, with nary a care in the world. They know no repression. They don't need polite metaphors for the love that once caused Forster panic and anxiety. They have their lattes, and designer flip flops and Lady Gaga.
Needless to say, I prefer polite metaphors and Merchant-Ivory movies.I just read in the papers that drinking more than two cups of coffee a day can be good for your health - specifically, some substance in coffee supposedly lowers the risk of diabetes. Alas I can only drink one cup a day, and never after 1pm for fear I would be tossing and turning the better part of the night away. However, I've been completely absorbed by the 2008 Korean drama Coffee Prince. I'm not ashamed to admit this because this is simply one of the best things I've seen in a long while and it's a very well made entertainment, perfectly cast (gorgeous good actors) and cleverly written to milk every adult tear still left in the desert of your folorn heart. It's completely escapist of course, with little that is realistic, but that's its magic I suppose. The girl is so poor that she has to disguise herself as a boy to work in a coffee house; No it doesn't make sense, and even her poverty never feels desperate or ugly, and is instead an excuse for very cute antics, and silly behaviour. There's no real crisis, no fatal illness, nothing upsetting or stressful, just the bittersweet romance of The Butterfly Lovers, or Yentl, or As You Like It, where the boy falls in love with the boy who is a girl, but with a Starbucks setting.
Gong Yoo, the leading man, is of course meltingly adorable (as yummy as the best oyster omelette), and has become an obsession. I can't believe how ideal they've made him, and how unrealistic and impossible to match in real life. So that's my discovery in the Year of the Hare, and if you find yourself all alone this Valentine's Day, do not despair. Go to your nearest DVD store and buy Coffee Prince - Gong Yoo is simply the best thing since... E M Forster?

Sandcastle

I like it. R really, really likes it.
Sandcastle, directed by Boo Junfeng in his debut feature-length film, is a coming-of-age movie about a Singapore boy, En, age 18. That just about sums it up. But. It's alot more as well, thoughtful, felt and immediately engaging. The reviews so far emphasize the political commentary that is brought in by En’s discovery that his dead father was an activist in Singapore in the 1960s, but thankfully, this does not define the movie. What moved me was the movie's simple telling of En's getting to know his family, the nature of family bonds, the passage of life. Joshua Tan, the lead actor, really carried the movie in a mature, understated performance. En's relationship with his Chinese neighbour was the weakest link, and felt perfunctory and unconvinced. The art direction wasn't overwhelming, and didn't make Singapore either overly exotic nor pretty, but dignified and realistic. It feels fresh. It looks fresh. For this I'm grateful.

Oh, and the dragonflies. I think that the dragonflies completely lifted the movie into importance.
There are now two new talents to watch and this is exciting.

Weekend Reading List

You know, it's been more than a couple of years since I've been in Bangkok (if you know Singaporeans, you'll know how truly unusual this is), what with the city's recent anti government protests turning violent and curfew being imposed, and with things still in a state of confusion, I'd become quite nostalgic for those fun days and crazy Bangkok nights, and so when I cam across this novel Siam: The Woman Who Shot a Man by Lily Tuck, I picked it up and have been reading this pretty much non-stop. It's a simple read and I think Ms Tucker is attempting Arundhoti Roi (and not quite getting there) but it's an entertaining account of Thailand in the 1960s, though very much from an outsider perspective, which I guess is how we all experience the city. As often as we visit the city and think we 'know' it, we actually don't. The novel is also about this woman's obsession with Jim Thompson, and his mysterious disappearance into the jungle. I guess you can read this as a metaphor. I think it's unintended.
I'm also reading Colm Toibin's collection of short works Mothers and Sons, and intend to take it with me when I go to Manila during the week - I'm particularly close to my mother and I'm quite worried that the stories might be disturbing - one craves the light and escapist on trips abroad. I do, anyway.

H, in her last legs at this particular job, gave me summer's number of The Economist's Intelligent Life, and I have to say this magazine is full of stories that interest me. The cover story is a longish read on David Hockney; He's an iPad convert and makes drawings on this gadget, did you know? Another feature is on the Italian art of 'stone painting' - one of those mind-bogglingly intricate crafts that amaze me. I remember being fascinated by those paintings made into tables and consoles in a museum in Florence and thinking it would drive me crazy if I had to work on something so seemingly impossible. Yes, I'm one of those that look at modern art installations as insubstantial gimmicks requiring zero skill. I don't get it. I don't really care. Further in the book there's a feature on the style of Graham Greene, Kriston Scott Thomas's career (I love Ms Scott Thomas), book reviews, Marienbad, New Delhi etc.Go look at it, it's a good magazine, a less glitzy British version of Vanity Fair if you will.
The 1909 photo (top) is of Mark Twain reading in bed, possibly my favourite activity.

Weekend Reading List

I'd never taken a morning flight to London before and found out that the SQ 308 flight that leaves Singapore at 9am for London is probbaly the most civilised flight you can take, if you, like me, have a very rigid body clock and are prone to jetlag. It's more civilised than the red-eye for me because by the time those midnight flights actually take off, it's already three hours pass my normal bedtime. What with the feeding and fuss that goes on and on when you board a flight, I'm jet-lagged even before I start. And how people can eat a three-course meal plus cheese after midnight is rather beyond me, and reminds me of those Enid Blyton midnight picnics in my beloved childhood books.Yes, gentle reader, I consumed Enid Blyton books like a caterpillar consumes a jasmine bush - rapidly, remorselessly, thoroughly - not a leaf unchewed. By the way, those books are forever desecrated by Enid, the 2009 biopic I watched recently. Helena Bonham Carter, as Enid Blyton, is an unsympathetic, damaged, and hypocritical monster. The accent is wonderfully posh (who speaks like this anymore? Not anyone in London, let me tell you), but the character appalling, and makes one reappraise Ms Blyton's prodigious output in a negative light. All is not innocence and summer picnics and cute kids.
Back to the flight: It's 13 hours or so, and when you reach London, (it's bedtime for my body clock), just enough of a stretch for you to take a hot bath, order a meal, and then sleep for a very long time. And then it's the next day, and you can go about your trip as buoyant as a butterfly. Of course I stayed awake the entire flight (it is day for me after all!) and read the 1931 Agatha Christie book The Sittaford Mystery from cover to cover. It starts and ends with a seance - very thrilling. If I wasn't on a flight, I'd never be able to read uninterupted like this, and so I was very pleased. I hope no one is going to make a biopic of Dame Agatha Chrsitie and spoil her wonderful books for me, or else another great pleasure will be sullied.
Did you know that Gustav Klimt was also a fashion designer and photographer? I'm looking at a very interesting little book from Assouline titled Klimt & Fashion. It studies his portraits with emphasis on the clothes and frabrics, some of which were actual dresses and prints he designed with his mistress Emilie Floge, who managed an important couture house in Vienna in the 1910s. The photos of Ms Floge wearing those Werner Werkstatte clothes are inspiring.To recover from London, I'm reading the collected writings of Diana Mosley, The Pursuit of Laughter: Essays, Articles, Reviews & Diary of The Most Controversial Mitford Sister. Those Mitford girls are so very twee.

A Pair of Sunbirds

A pair of olive-backed sunbirds have decided to build a nest in the longkong tree on my balcony. They have been busily flying in and out for a week or so, with industry that is inspiring. Initially, I noticed that the floor around the longkong tree (well, a sapling in a blue glazed Vietnamese urn) was littered with bits of dirt and I thought it was from the overflow of my mother's vealous watering. I just swept it up. But it persisted: And day after day, got more untidy. And then I looked up and there in the top-most branches, almost hidden by the large leaves was what looked like a loop of furry, mud-speckled, bark-encrusted string. It's not pretty, and looked nothing like what you'd think a nest looks like.

But mother and I grew fond of the birds, and thrilled at the prospects of having the eggs and the baby birds in the coming month. We get worried when the winds blow the branches violently in the afternoons, lest the nest tumble down. I try not to get in the birds' way when I'm putting out or taking in the laundry. When I'm in sight, the birds make a U-turn in mid-air, 12 stories up, and hover at a distance, or swoop about, untill I go in, or out.

Every morning, over coffee, mother and I would talk about our sunbirds, and the progress of the nest-building; It has more shape now, like a straggly gourd, or a pouch with a clear opening in the belly for the mother bird to lay her eggs in.Mother left some coloured yarn out on the balcony railing and hung some on the branches "So that they won't need to fly so far to pick up those string and things".

So far, the birds have not picked the yarn out, only the breeze.

I've grown very fond of the rustling the birds make in the longkong, and I miss the sharp twitter and squeaks they make when at sunset, the sunbirds leave off nest-making and go and take their much-needed rest somewhere (I wonder where?).

I can't wait to see their blue-green eggs, and I can't wait to see the little ones appear and start to sing, and the drama of the feeding of the babies (will there be more to clean up after?).

I would be so sad when they leave!

Weekend Reading List

Since I started freelancing, I have been going to the old office, and I've been taking home stacks of the weeklies 8 Days and i-Weekly. They certainly add cheer and gloss, and while I can't say I've been reading them religiously, I love looking at the pictures of celebs doing stupid things, or in period costumes looking very silly. Flip, flip, flip and then chuck. i-Weekly also comes with a lifestyle supplement (I only just discovered) which Mother finds useful: Lots of recipes, gardening tips, astrological readings. Alas, my Chinese really is limited.

Quite on a different note, I'm reading The Spell, the 1998 novel by Alan Hollinghurst, all over again. It's been such a while since he has come out with a book, and I really miss him. I have all his books, every last one of them read several times, dreamily: The lush, erotic The Swimming Pool Library (1988); The Folding Star, 1994; And one of my all-time faves, The Line of Beauty, 2004, for which he won the Booker Prize. Incidentally, Hollinghurst, like Mother, is a Gemini, born 26 May.

In The Closet

My friend M gave me a teak Chinese cupboard that arrived this morning (the movers were three Chinese nationals), and I spent a happy, if sweaty, two hours moving the furniture around. I cleaned it out, with wet and dry cloths, taping roach killer inside the drawers, sniffing for suspicious smells, smelling nothing but the clean, bookish smell of old teak.
There were pale cat hairs though, from his three cats.
Now, the cupboard is sitting inside my mother's room.
Thirty-something of the bags I've given her over the years (some used a lot, some hardly used), accessories and scarves (I unfolded a black velvet Chanel scarf that glittered with silvery camellias), Vietnamese note books, old phone batteries and pins are now neatly ranged inside this cupboard.
I always feel a sense of accomplishment when I put things away in order; It gives me such a clean feeling to throw long-forgotten rubbish out.