1 comments about Think of England.

1. Martin Parr is one of the great documentary photographers of Britain and this book is a prime example of his talent in the field. This book is a wonderful collection of the quirks and eccentricities of the British. No subject is overlooked as Parr covers food, dress, interior design and gardens, pomp and circumstance and Brits at the seaside. It's a view of England not seen by most tourists which makes it all the more relevant for foreign audiences. Browsing through the book one can see several cultural similarities like the picture of a winning dessert at a district garden society show, or people talking on their mobile phones.
   
   If you're a bit of an anglophile or simply enjoy good photography, this book won't disappoint. I bought this book at the Tate Modern after having seen several of the photos in various galleries, and find it inspiring to aspiring photographers like myself.

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1 comments about A Portrait of England.

1. I bought this thinking it would be incredible pictures and history. There are some incredible pictures, but not of famous things like you'd expect..it's more like random lakes and such. It's written from a "save the earth" perspective with people telling why they love the land. Not quite what I wanted for a coffee table book , but it's decent.

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5 comments about Weymouth Sands.

1. Another extraordinary (and impossible to review, really) book from John Cowper Powys: The only things to which I can compare it are Proust, from whose depths Powys has clearly imbibed, and The Glastonbury Romance, except that this work seems much the much deeper and sadder of the two Powys works, touching on the subjects most dear to Powys, without any tangents regarding the Holy Grail legend etc. If one could put a name to the abiding undercurrent here, and one can't really, it would be Animism. Every dancing seaweed, incoming tide and rocky promontory seems suffused with a dynamic and personality of its own with a peculiar force over every character. This book is also the sadder of the two, but it is the sadness that arises from the unraveling of the deeps of human existence. Dostoyevsky is NOT the writer to which Powys should be compared---That writer is Proust. Powys is the only writer in English who comes even close to Proustian depths. Laurence Durrell made a stab at it in The Alexandria Quartet, but failed miserably----as far as his stated, hubristic intent to outdo both Proust AND Joyce in those four works. But Powys is not hubristic, thus his success. Becoming absorbed in this book, one eventually gets the feeling
   
   "...as if there were always blowing a faint, supernatural wind through this world, holding a secret of assuagement for troubled hearts, that is only perceptible when it can find a straw, a feather, a gossamer-seed, a leaf, in the debris of circumstance light enough for it to stir." P.541
   
   
   It is a lovely, sad (at times also comic), deep book of wisdom. Scarce wonder that Powys never made it into a hidebound English Lit. Syllabus!
   
   So, read and take delight. You won't be graded!



2. This one seems to have been pulled from the most watery depths of Powys' imagination. It is saturated with an inscrutable feminine element, a mysterious plexus of forces. As much as I like most of his other books this one seems the most naturally magical, not as often forced as the others. The plot possibly suffers from his giving in to the dreamy depths of his imagination, but I welcome the richness of sheer strange atmosphere he manages because of this limitation.



3. Having read "Wolf Solent", Powys's first major novel of the period, I was excited to get hold of a copy of "Weymouth Sands".
   The novel starts with the arrival at Weymouth of a young lady, Perdita, destined to become a companion to an upper-class local of rather strange temperament.
   
   As usual with Powys, he gets right inside the heads of the major characters - and most of the minor characters, too - and this is Powys's major strength as a writer, his ability to make the characters truly three-dimensional. Somehow when we read Powy's work he has the ability to make us believe absolutely that the thoughts running through the minds of his characters are exactly "right".
   
   The main character is "Jobber" Skald and this novel actually appeared in cut-down form as "Jobber Skald" - avoid that version and read Weymouth Sands, instead. The "jobber" spends most of the novel carrying a large stone in his pocket with which he intends to murder one of the novel's other main characters, a rich and singularly unlikable industrialist who has taken over the town's quarry.
   
   Some of the characters seem to be analogues of characters in "Wolf Solent". For instance, one of the characters seems to suffer from sexual problems of a similar nature to a character in the earlier novel.
   There are some wonderful characters to be found in the pages. One of them, a deranged local who wanders the seafront preaching to any who will listen, has a thing for young women and attracts them to his lodging, but falls foul of the local police and is incarcerated in an institution where an unlikable doctor practices vivisection.
   
   Weymouth Sands is very readable and I anticipated finding some kind of denouement at the end, one that would render worthwhile the struggles of its characters. Sadly, Powys seems to have been unable or unwilling to finish the story with a bang, and the tale simply peters out in a rather unsatisfying way.
   
   Therefore, overall, I find it a good read, though a lesser story than "Wolf Solent". Repetition rather than origination.



4. Over the whistling wavecrests and amid the flying surf, deep gurgling rock chasms, as the wind catches your soul. Over stalks of Sea lavender and over chittering seed-pods of sea thrift. You will bubble and delite with every line of this spectacular book. There are no writers of this calibre left on the planet in my opinion. I hope you all read this and become a Powys fan as I have. A readers special moment is here and waiting for you to envelope with and rejoice as a master wordsmith touchest you deeply. Not to mention the wicked humor that goes along with every page.Enjoy WT



5. Powys has stated himself that his novels are propaganda for his "life illusion." This is his philosophy of life and the consciousness he forged for himself. In Weymouth Sands, as in his other novels, he indulges his idiosyncratic and highly subjective world view. For example, at one point Powys states that one of the characters could describe the sunset in terms of Spengler's take on Magian Culture. This allusion is too obscure for most. His characters are not believable. Jobber Skald is a prophet and Sylvanus is a mystic. Neither gives anything like a coherent set of beliefs, just the occasional ejactulatory statement. Both are earthbound not spiritual; relishing whisky and pursuing very young women. The women are passive and the love making is tame. Powys himself preferred to look at (young) women rather than touch them. Some critics say Sylvanus practises Tantra, but you would not learn about the subject from this book. Powy's prose is in ejaculatory mode, as usual, evidenced by the promiscuous use of exclamation marks and wordy gushings. There is no dramatic development of plot. His descriptions of nature can be moving, but his characters leave one cold. Powys has been compared to novelists such as D.H. Lawrence, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. However, I would compare him to Charles Williams, friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Powys and Williams both present unconvincing characters and plots in their idiosyncratic and quasi mystical novels.

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