tender is paradise

i've always meant to read fitzgerald, but i think it's the covers i keep coming across that finally impelled me to begin:



this passage from tender is the night amused me:

For a moment Nicole stood looking down at the Mediterranean, but there was nothing to do with that, even with her tireless hands. Presently Dick came out of his one-room house carrying a telescope and looked east toward Cannes. In a moment Nicole swam into his vision, whereupon he disappeared into the house and came out with a megaphone. He had many light mechanical devices.

'Nicole,' he shouted, 'I forgot to tell you that as a final apostolic gesture I invited Mrs Abrams, the woman with the white hair.'

'I suspected it. It's an outrage.'

The ease with which her reply reached him seemed to belittle his megaphone, so she raised her voice and called, 'Can you hear me?'

'Yes.' He lowered the megaphone and then raised it stubbornly. 'I'm going to invite some more people too. I'm going to invite the two young men.'

'All right,' she agreed placidly.

'I want to give a really bad party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there's a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.'

troll

from time to time i plan to blog about books i own, or books i love (which is generally an interchangeable category).

a while ago i bought this book, troll:



i bought it both for the illustrations (some of which are sprinkled below) and for the preface's description of what a troll is. specifically, norwegian trolls. excerpted:

... here the modern world seems strangely unreal and irrelevant. Face to face with Nature's ceaseless rhythm modern man, who measures his restless life in terms of hours and minutes, seems singularly ineffective... [] A beardy old giant crashes to the ground, overwhelmed by the burden of years; he lies there among the young shoots, from which new trees will grow...[]

The troll is dark and ponderous and covered with a tangle of foliage, like a piece of the woods and mountains brought to life.



Everyone who has ever seen a troll - and there must be many, since the image of the troll has been firmly fixed in the imagination of the people - are agreed that all trolls are very old. A troll is born of the timeless forest; he is moss-covered as an old stone. When one troll calls to another it takes a hundred years before he gets an answer. You can hear his voice in the storm, and glimpse the outlines of him in the mist, as he crashes his way through the undergrowth when the brook is spate in spring. Or you can see his gargantuan footprints in the snow in winter.

He symbolizes the fear of natural phenomenon, the terror of the woods, the horror of the dark that has always lurked in men's minds... [] In the fairy tales the troll is not always represented as a monster; he is not only a source of terror. The terror has often been overcome, and exorcised fear will in a twinkle give way to mirth and laughter.



i love a good subtext and i think in particular, trolls have this great relevancy and appeal... we have our modern-day trolls (i've even been trolled myself), and it ties in to folk art, which so many contemporary artists are reaching towards in their work. the basic premises here of life existing in the shadows, of old life giving way to the new, of exorcised fears becoming a source of strength, these are all themes i love.



below is a troll i collaged a month or so after buying this book... i'd like to make some more trolls, in a more narrative context.