I love how crooked things are every where in England, but what I loved about this door was the fact the house was built in 1693 and rebuilt in 1778! To top it all off, they even state that fact on the front of the house! The house sits on a bend in the lane, and it too bends along with the road ever so slightly. It stands a bit crooked, but like the rest of us getting older and better! I wonder why the house was rebuilt, fire, more space needed, or….it will keep that a secret from me!
This gallery contains 2 photos.
We were all taught early on in school that you don’t end a sentence with a preposition, but sometimes naughty things happen. The classic example is… What did you step on? We would never write or say– What on did … Continue reading
This gallery contains 5 photos.
I was back in Oxford on a Bank Holiday. I always vow to never travel on Bank Holidays and yet here I was thrashing my way through the crowds. The line at the Thornton’s Ice Cream window was a mile … Continue reading
Once in a while, a word comes along that really jars you out of the read. I was really into this current novel that I am reading…when I read the following sentence.
She goggled.
What? Googled? That was my first thought and that just shows you how dominate that word has become in my mindset. It was a short sentence to say the least, so no need to reread it. I had to go back and read the sentence before this one to get context and then jog the old brain cells.
Ah yes..goggled…goggles…eye glasses…expression archaic meaning more than likely… she stare wide-eyed. Or, she stared with a wide-eyed look of surprise. Or, her eyes bulged with surprise…either way this character was surprised at something.
Okay, I thought, that word probably was in common usage when this story takes place…let it go and get back into the story…but another chapter later, and again, this character goggles, goggled, and goggled again. A very short concise way of expressing her astonishment, which I think used once would have sufficed, and the other times, well, perhaps there were a few other word choices available to this particular author. It very well may be the correct usage for the word, but when it jars the reader out of the story on to the internet to google the meaning of goggle…you’ve broken that magic bridge and sent the reader crashing back to reality.
I had to fight Google to get the current meaning of goggle, as Google dominates the web searches for more than 25 pages. I don’t give up easily! So I Googled, goggle meaning of, and finally had some success. It was indeed what I thought it meant.
Curious choice of a word and if you are now seeing smoke? Well, that is my spell checker who now has goggled at this post to the point of exasperation!
Have you come across odd words lately in your reads?
This gallery contains 1 photo.
I do like poking my nose into all sorts of things. I had to go up this alleyway and see what the back of those fabulous Boston Brownstones were all about. I found this door and many others as the … Continue reading
Strange things happen in the city, I’m lucky that I have been spared quite a few of them. When the family lived in Primrose Hill, in London, the war was on. My father was only a young boy when he sat in the front room listening to the wireless…war had broken out. That night the air raid sirens went off, my grandmother hurried the family into the bomb shelter at the bottom of the garden. My dad hated going into the shelter. All the action was happening outside and he was missing it. Whenever a bomb hit in the neighbour, the local boys would rush out and hunt for bits of shrapnel they collected and traded. It was exciting times for a young lad, and naturally terrifying for anyone over the age of ten who understood the devastation of war.
WWII Unexploded Bomb London (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
That night, to my father’s delight, the house took a direct hit. When they came out of the shelter, the roof was smoking and a great gap let in the night sky. He raced into the house, up the stairs as fast as he could. It was his room! The attic room! He flung open the door and through the smoke saw the best thing ever. An unexploded bomb in his bed! What fabulous luck! He was about to go and examine it when my grandmother, in near hysterics, grabbed him by the collar and drug him out of the house to safety. He never quite forgave that. He sulked the rest of the night and the next day, not really listening to the relentless lectures about safety and danger that the aunties and my grandmother were raining down on him. After all, it was rather a splendid find and so cruelly snatched out of his reach. Years later when he told the story, still chuckling, he was far wiser about war and how easily tragedy strikes.
I was reminded of his adventure when I read about a woman in London, who by all accounts was quite a local stunner. She had just slipped into the bath, and was just relaxing, when her house took a direct hit. The house was destroyed. No one expected to find any survivors, but when rescue workers came to the scene, they found her with the bathtub over her like a giant iron shield. What a bath that was!
A warm bathtub and an empty bed in London, both very lucky for their occupants, adding to the tales of a great city!
Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death — fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant. –Edna Ferber
English: Photograph of Edna Ferber (1885-1968) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I came across this quote and fell in love with it, but I have to confess I have no idea who this writer was, or indeed what her writing was about. It turns out that the author of this quote was none other than the Pulitzer Prize winner, Edna Ferber. She was born 1885 in Kalamazoo Michigan, the daughter of Julia and Jacob Ferber, Hungarian Immigrants. Edna in her autobiography wrote of her pride in being Jewish and of the terrible anti-Semitism so common during her time. She writes of being invited to a High Society dinner party in New York. The women she was with didn’t know Ferber and apparently two of the other guests were Jewish. A woman boasted that whenever she discovered a book was written by a Jewish Writer, she threw it away into the garbage. Ferber and the two other Jewish Women, walked out. I like that…just from reading that little bit, I knew I liked this woman and had to find out more about her.
She started out her writing career working for various newspapers, but it was when she was recovering from an illness that fiction captured her. She quickly sold her first short story, and by 1912, her short stories were collected in volumes. It’s said that reviewers thought she was a man, pretending to be a woman, to cover up the fact that it was really a man writing…what a mindset in those days…only a proper man could write! Thankfully we have evolved somewhat since then. Ferber apparently was really proud of this accusation, as she believed, as I do, that writers should be judged by the work, not their sex, and I would add fame. Their writing should always stand on its own merits.
Ferber was quite the writer, a playwright whose plays were turned into films. Two of which I have seen, Stage Door, and Show Boat. But still I hadn’t read any of her actual writing. She won her Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for her novel, SO BIG. It sold a massive 300,000 thousand copies! This in the day when the internet and social media wasn’t even a glimmer in someone’s eyes! Not to be content with all that, she wrote two biographies, thirteen novels, endless short stories, and eight of her novels were made into films.
Edna died in April of 1968 of cancer. She was a strong woman, a woman ahead of her time, she’s been noted as saying, marriage was not part of her game plan. She gifted her writing to her country as she believed her writing encouraged women to become assertive so that they could have freedom and enjoy success in any part of their lives. Women were not destined to be housewives with no other options. She was an extraordinary woman, and I will have to hunt down one of her books and have a read.
Reviews : SO BIG
“A masterpiece. . . . It has the completeness, [the] finality, that grips and exalts and convinces.” — Literary Review
Widely regarded as the master work of celebrated author and Algonquin Round Table mainstay Edna Ferber—who also penned other classics including Show Boat, Giant, Ice Palace, Saratoga Trunk, and Cimarron—So Big is a rollicking panorama of Chicago’s high and low life at the turn of the 20th Century. Following the travails of gambler’s daughter Selina Peake DeJong as she struggles to maintain her dignity, her family, and her sanity in the face of monumental challenges, this is the stunning and unforgettable “novel to read and to remember” by an author who “critics of the 1920s and 1930s did not hesitate to call… the greatest American woman novelist of her day” (New York Times).
Quotes:
“Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never! ”
“Many earnest young writers with a flow of adjectives and a passion for detail have attempted to describe the quiet of a great city at night, when a few million people within it are sleeping, or ought to be. They work in the clang of a distant owl car, and the roar of an occasional “L” train, and the hollow echo of the footsteps of the late passer-by. They go elaborately into description, and are strong on the brooding hush, but the thing has never been done satisfactorily.”
Have you read her novels? If so I would love to hear your comments about her writing style, and topics.
This gallery contains 1 photo.
Rochester has some amazing doors, and funny enough, loads of very crooked doors. This door once led to an amazing Sunday Roast, with potatoes crisped to perfection in goose fat, and rare roast beef on offer. If one could manage … Continue reading
Finally the jet lag is just a memory. This flight was incredibly noisy. The galley crew sounded as if they were hammering pots and pans instead of serving up microwaved aeroplane food! My flight partner was a chap on his way to Spain, who, I think must have thought I was the last person he was going to meet and told me his life story! I won’t bore you with it here, as I resorted to headphones to save my sanity! London is looking good in the sunlight! I’m looking forward to reading your posts with a strong cup of tea before I head up to Oxford!
This gallery contains 12 photos.
Last week was National Gardening Week in the UK. I love gardening, rather I should say I love other people’s gardens. When it comes to digging in the muck, weeding, well….you’ll find me sipping a cup of tea, just out … Continue reading
A camera travels 