The Black Isle

Another print I like. Meiji era print of a woman sleeping/dreaming while her husband is at the battlefront:

Japanese woodblock print I find enchanting.

Kawase Hasui (1883 - 1957)
An Avenue at Nikko, 1930

From the eBay description:
On the way to the famous shrines at Nikko, Hasui shows the towering crytomeria trees with a single figure along the walk. A beautiful nature image by Hasui. This image was one of the Hasui prints from the 1936 Toledo Museum of Art show- a groundbreaking show of contemporary Japanese prints in the USA.

A closer view:

Finally, a memoir to look forward to: Can You Ever Forgive Me? by Lee Israel. The confessions of a literary forger (ie. forger of letters “written by” Julie Andrews, Noel Coward, Lillian Hellman, etc., all created in a studio apartment on the Upper West Side), out next month.

From the July 28, 2008 issue of Time:

Lev Grossman on James Wood on books

…The point of How Fiction Works is supposed to be Wood’s theory of the novel. And yes, we dutifully make the rounds of narration, dialogue and so on, topics that inspire in even the most passionate reader a special, pure kind of boredom. But as Wood himself observes, “The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it.” The novel is corrosive to systematic thought — whatever is good about it is precisely that increment that resists theorization. The great pleasure of Wood’s book lies in the examples, not the points they prove, and the lessons lie in watching him read, not think. The novel exists only in practice, not in theory, in the moment when the brain hits the page — the moment when a dying servant’s bare heels meet beneath the sheets on his deathbed.

Words from the wise: Guy Maddin introduces Tod Browning’s The Unknown at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival by way of musing on happy dream-hours and sad waking-hours.

Via The Evening Class.

Iain Banks on The Wasp Factory, from Guardian Unlimited.  

The above is here because I feel I should post at least one thing a month to justify the $8/month fee to Bluehost.com.