Pointer 1: Jan Morris

[liv]

I have what is by now looking like rather an ambitious goal to post 10 pointer posts to other content by 15^th May. Anyway, here's the first: did you know that Jan Morris has a Tumblr, janmorris? (Discovered via a Making Light comment thread, I think.)

Morris is an amazing writer of both real and fictional travelogues. She's also a pioneering trans and equal marriage activist. Because of her history, some of the biographical material on the web uses rather old-fashioned language about her, such as deadnaming or using expressions such as "she was born male", just so you're aware before following any links from that Tumblr.

Anyway, the Tumblr itself is, as far as I can gather, excerpts from a recent book? Or the book itself published in Tumblr form, or just publicity for the book, I'm not quite clear. But anyway, it runs from March 2011 to April 2012, with just lovely little digital postcards, a beautiful photo and an evocative paragraph of description, more or less daily for just over a year. And then it just trails off, so I don't know if Morris got to the end of her book, or if she just got bored of Tumblr, or what.

But anyway, there's something about octogenarian professional writers exploring the possibilities of a new medium. Like Frederick Pohl's rather amazing blog.

Not much to report for Reading Wednesday. I haven't finished any books, and hopefully the more bitesizedreading style stuff is going to furnish me with more links so I can keep up with the 3W4DW challenge.

I'm still in the middle of Suite française by Irène Némirovsky, which is very good but very bleak. For example, there's a long and horrifying description of the awfulness of a horde of refugees desperately trying to get out of Paris southwards and westwards ahead of the German invasion, on foot in a boiling hot June, carrying their most treasured possessions. And suddenly you get: Ils n'avaient pas été mitraillés encore. [They hadn't yet been machine-gunned.] So it's not what I reach for when I have a few minutes spare and want to relax, really.

And I still haven't got to a library or charity shop to pick out a book just by its cover, which is next on my list for the challenge. I did grab from the giveaway shelf at work Balancing Act, a recent-ish Joanna Trollope that is set in Stoke, and I have a feeling that I'm going to end up reading that as brain candy when I can't face too much 1940s France.

Comments

[liv]

Heh, I most certainly wouldn't have expected her to be daunted by Tumblr, but she could well not have heard of it, or perhaps not grasp the possibilities of the form.

Where does your icon come from, by the way? It looks slightly like a picture I've seen of an ancestor of mine who was the youngest of ten, mostly female, cricketing siblings in an era with fashion something like that, not that I'm very good at dating things by looking at clothes.

[legionseagle]

It's the Countess of Derby's XI from 1779 and the context is here

[liv]

Thank you! I am indeed terrible at judging eras by clothes, that's a hundred years earlier than the picture I'm thinking of. Though I had heard the thing about women inventing overarm bowling in order to be able to play in hooped skirts.