Carrie Chappell > Recent Status Updates

It's early 2019, and I already know that Ali Smith is one of my great discoveries this year. Of course, you all already know her, but I'm late to the game.

This books stunned me. A gorgeous walk through the rivers of gender, time, art, and sight.

""There are a number of difficulties with dirty words, the first of which is that there aren't nearly enough of them; the second is that the people who use them are normally numskulls and prudes; the third is that in general they're not at all sexy, and the main reason for this is that no one loves them enough."

Un Coeur Simple is a strange-beautiful story.

"In the fog of flattery, he lost sight of the fact that goats and peasants are seldom the helms of empire."

"There are Bretons still alive who remember the mortifying difficulty of learning French—'a language whose words were like half-empty boxes, and you weren't even quite sure what was inside them'—and the endless insults from sneering teachers and patronizing newspaper articles."

"The 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees defined the frontier between France and Spain as 'the crest of the Pyrenees', but more than two centuries passed before the snowy battlements were measured accurately and the people of the high Pyrenees found out whether they were Spanish or French."

"The usual speed for an earth-shattering piece of news travelling over a hundred miles was between 4 and 7 mph. Le Havre heard about the fall of the Bastille (late afternoon, 14 July 1789) in the early hours of 17 July."

"In a rare surviving love note, written on a postcard in the 1900s in almost indecipherable spelling, a Vendée peasant told his fiancée, 'You're so fresh and lovely the only thing I can compare you to is fields of young cabbages before the caterpillars have got to them.'"

mccullough's ability to create historical narrative is wonderful. my proof is in my disturbance--my new fear of cholera!

I've already become really taken with this book. Poets, I think you should read it. But probably every writer should.

I don't know about this book yet...

It's so beautiful and so crushing, thus far.