Because you can't have depths without surfaces.
Linda Grant, thinking about clothes, books and other matters.
Pure Collection Ltd.
Net-a-porter UK

Friday 18 January 2008

The Normblog profile and forthcoming events

Me

In which I answer such questions as what philosophical truth I think it most important to disseminate, who are my cultural heroes, etc.

My website now has an update listing of readings, literary festivals etc for the next few months here

There will be further details of events Melbourne coming soon.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That was treat Linda, thanks!

Anonymous said...

Yes, lovely. I of course don't agree about the Bolshevik revolution - agree with the criticisms from the outset of Rosa Luxemburg (dear to the fine writer and intellectual biographer Geras) and the even deeper ones of the anarchist Emma Goldman "If I can't dance, I won't join your revolution" (sorry, paraphrase from memory). But not to comfort of the established order and the powerful, fresh from the massacres of the Great War and colonial adventures). No, I don't think the mass uprising was the poisonous root of Stalinist totalitarianism.

But this is not a political blog and it is not why I read it - I love its account of the fleeting world - perhaps you remember the Japanese expression - describing the wonderful prints of the Japanese 19th century, keenly attentive to fashion and modes of life. Some would find a place as illustrations for your blog.

And I wholeheartedly agree with Kafka and Coco Chanel. I don't know Grossman well enough - the more one reads, the more there is to read! Kafka pleases me doubly because he was a German-language writer and sometimes I feel an animosity among people I know of "Yiddishkeit" background to the Yekkes ... and someone very dear to my heart is a Yekke of Central European ancestry...

I haven't read enough in depth about Coco to know whether she viewed herself as a feminist - I mostly know her from the remarkable reportage of Marie-Claire (the original French one, of course) a monthly that seamlessly combined style and women's emancipation in the 1970s and beyond. I suspect not, given her background, but much as she would have hated the idea, she carried on the "dress reform" of feminists from the French Revolution (another bloody one) to the Suffragettes, no doubt with less rhetoric but more mainstream results.

I am discovering the poet Amelia Rosselli, the daughter of Italian-Jewish antifasicist Carlo Rosselli, and niece of his brother Nello, one of that remarkable little community from Turin!

She wrote in English as well, as she was a refugee in the US and Britain after the facist murder of her father and uncle.

So much to discover!