Season of gifts ~ We have a wonderful afternoon planned for you this Thursday.  Dr. Alan Bishop will be reading.  Third Thursdays are always reserved for an entertaining group of local authors, poets and other fascinating personalities.  They read from their own published work ~ sometimes introduce new work ~ and inevitably drift toward whatever literary subject interests those present.

Poetry of Vera Brittain will be Alan's focus this week; however, he has agreed to bring along one of his own books, Letters From a Generation.
              Thursday, November 21 at 1:00 p.m.

www.freedompress.ca

Thank you Tristan of Freedom Press and Gary McHale for a fun and informative afternoon ~ and for hanging around in the bookshop long after scheduled hours.

Available in The Neat Little Bookshop, VICTORY IN THE NO-GO ZONE.  $19.95, Gary McHale.  Freedom Press Canada Inc., 2013.

Doris Lessing on literary excellence ~

"It is interesting to imagine what our vision of the world would be like had there been no novelists, no storytellers.  Like the dark side of the moon, or the sea floors where fishes still unknown to science live, or reports from unexplored countries where maps said 'Here be monsters'.  Literature makes us all kin, because every tale is a report from people whose differences are only variations on the theme of our humanity.  Without the explorations of writers we would not know them.
"While I read a novel, enjoying all the skills that go with literary excellence - the design, the complexities, the ironies, the insights - I am saying, 'But wait a minute, here's a region of the world (or of society or of psychology) I haven't been in before.'
"If we can say, 'No human behaviour is alien to me', then it is because we know it all from literature."

~ Doris Lessing (Oct. 22, 1919 - Nov. 17, 2012)  English novelist

~ Forward to The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, Ian Ousby, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

English author Doris Lessing dead at age 94.  Born to British parents in Persia (now Iran) October 22, 1919, Lessing moved with her family to Zimbabwe, South Africa, at age five and lived there until she was twenty-nine.  Moved to England in 1949.
Leaving school at age fourteen she was self-educated from then on.

Lessing has over 55 works to her name having won among many awards the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 at the age of eighty-eight.  A word for young writers?  Doris advised, "Acquire a tough skin as soon as possible."

Among Lessing's novels:  The Golden Notebook and The Grass is Singing.

All Quiet

"What mainly worries me, if you'll excuse my speaking on my own affairs for the moment, is a strengthening suspicion that in my character there is an antipathy between 'art' and 'life.'  I find that once I 'give in' to another person, as I have given in not altogether voluntarily, but almost completely, to Ruth,* it impossible to achieve that mental 'clenching' that crystallises a pattern and keeps it still while you draw it.  It's very easy to float along in a semi-submerged way, dissipating one's talent for pleasing by amusing and being affectionate to the other --easy because the returns are instant and delightful -- but I find, myself, that this letting-in of a second person spells death to perception and the desire to express, as well as the ability.  Time & time again I feel that before I write anything else at all I must drag myself out of the water, shake myself dry and sit down on a lonely rock to contemplate glittering loneliness.  Marriage, of course (since you mentioned marriage), is impossible if one wants to do this."

~ Philip Larkin.  Letter to J. B. Sutton, 7 April 1946.  English poet, novelist (Aug. 9, 1922 - Dec. 2, 1985)  Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940 - 1985.  Edited by Anthony Thwaite.  Faber and Faber Limited, 1992.
*Ruth was Larkin's first girlfriend.  Met in 1945.  Split in 1950.

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