I coulda been an influencer

My Father’s Guru : Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

 

Jeffrey Masson’s father’s guru PB Brunton, known in the family as PB, unlike Sri  Ramakrishna, was not given to ecstatic fits or animal possession. A small neat man with a pointed beard he inspired the devotion of Masson’s father Jacques and his uncle Bernard without performing any spectacular feats.

Min Jin Lee: Pachinko

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration (Charles Dickens)

Tim Sullivan : The Monk

Tim Sullivan has written five D S George Cross novels and I am sad to say I have read them all in the last month. Sad, not because they are badly written or trashy, but sad because I will have to wait until next year before I can read his next book, The Teacher.

Elizabeth Taylor: Angel

Heather Rose : nothing bad ever happens here

Believing and belonging occupy a great deal of human life. What to believe? How to belong? All of it is a mystery that we fill with stories.

Heather Rose’s memoir nothing bad ever happens here is her attempt to tease out the stories that make sense of her life. A Tasmanian, and author of seven books, but best known for her prize-winning novel about  Marina Abramovic, The Museum of Modern Love, she has also run a successful advertising agency and raised three children while writing her books. Hers is a life of hard work and a relentless search for meaning and spirit.

Mary Ellen

My grandmother treadled the sewing machine

singing Irish songs and laying down the law

on subjects such as children drinking tea. 

It would be the black blood we would have.

From her I have such words as “skerrick”,

“smashed to smithereens”. When our mantlepiece fell down

she loaded up the marble chunks, and wheeled

the tipping barrow like a man. At ninety four

she marched along the tramtracks in her nightie

among the yawning street girls. 

To the polite young policeman offering a lift

“The only lift I’ll be getting is a lift under the ear!” 

From Ireland to the wheatfields by way of Curry’s pub

still the Junoesque girl behind the bar

keeping men at bay with the whips of her words.

Paul Griffiths : The Tilted Cup : Noh Stories

Sometimes one can be in the mood for a slender beautiful book, with short poetic stories and evocative illustrations. The adult version of a fairy tale really. And where better to find this than in the Cahiers Series published in Sylph Editions by the American University in Paris. The twenty-three volumes in this series have authors ranging from Muriel Spark to Anne Carson, from Lydia Davis to Simon Leys, with titles like Notes from the Hall of Uselessness to Nay Rather. For my first choice in this series, I chose volume twenty-two, The Tilted Cup by Paul Griffiths

Peter May: A Winter Grave