Sunday Short: 3.5 by Betsy Turcot

I imagine her peel the corners free,turn the image over,savor pen scratch, smile that smile that will bend meto the place I dream of going back to being.

Betsy Turcot is one of my favourite poets around at the moment. Her ability to twist moments of perfect domesticity into moments of perfect prose is almost unparalleled. I got to see her read at the Riverbend Poetry Series a few weeks ago for the third time, and it was as magical as it always is. 3.5 is one of my favourites, but you can read a lot more over on her blog. Perfect Sunday reading.

You can read 3.5 by Betsy Turcot online here.

Friday Finds

You know when you discover a new singer and then immediately descent into a blackhole until you've listened to their entire catalogue a gazillion times? That was my week with Basia Bulat. She's glorious. Her cover of Robyn's Dancing on My Own is pretty close to perfect too.

- Needless to say, I am ridiculously excited for Lumberjanes, a new comic-book series by Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis and Brooke Allen, so these variant covers had me chin-handsing all week.

- The Stella Prize shortlist has been announced.

- The first official image from the new Sailor Moon series has leaked! (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

- A Captain Marvel movie? (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

- These genderswapped Disney and Dreamworks characters are pretty perfect too.

- These photos of former playboy bunnies are pretty rad too.

YEVU

I am completely obsessed with YEVU right now, a collection designed by Australian, Anna Robertson after a trip to Ghana. She utilises colour and mismatched prints in a way that's beyond perfect. Plus, styling the beautiful, bright colours on such gorgeous models against such sepia-toned backdrops is stunning and makes the whole thing pop. You can check out the full collection over at the YEVU website.

  

A Book a Week in 2014: 'The Fault in Our Stars' by John Green (11/52)

Hazel is sixteen years old, philosophical, whip smart and an avid reader. She also has stage 4 thyroid cancer and metastasis forming in her lungs. During a group therapy session, she meets Augustus Waters, an amputee, cancer-patient currently in remission. Their meeting becomes a catalyst for friendship, romance, comings of age, enlightenments and disillusionments, and, well, a pretty darn good novel.

I'm not going to lie, I expected to like this from the get go. I'm a fan of John Green generally and beyond that, I love YA novels that deal with more adult themes but don't lose the youth to them. The sweetness. The Fault in Our Stars does an excellent job of that, maintaining the exuberance of adolescence but not ever being condescending about it. It balances emotion, experience, romance and friendship beautifully, and the result is this heartstopping novel of first times and last times.

Beyond that, Hazel is an awesome protagonist, stronger than she knows and snarky and whip smart - it's not hard to see why Gus is swept off his feet by her. And vice versa too, Gus is a pretty solid male lead. Watching the inevitable conclusion to their romance is tenderly explored, not glamorised, but not entirely bleak either, which is a pretty impressive feat on Green's part. And, y'know, not going to lie, I may have cried for about a year at the end of it too.

4 out of 5 video-game adaption novels.

Beauforts

My grandfather passed away yesterday. 

He'd been unwell for a while, battling dementia, pneumonia and fluid in the brain, so it was a far cry from unexpected. That said, it's hit me harder than I expected, clenched its fist around my heart and sat heavy and unpleasantly in me. That's probably not all that uncommon given the circumstances. I'm twenty-three years old and have just lost my second grandparent in two years. Just lost the only grandfather I've ever known.

It's a weird thing to think about. To adjust to the loss of a loved one is to ultimately grapple with grief. To try and align in your head what parts of your life - and your family's life - have changed when an integral piece of it has been removed. Grandad was ill for a long time, and, in many ways, we lost him when we lost my grandmother. His rapid decline into dementia presented that for us. He went from having mostly good days to mostly bad ones, and by the end of it all he'd barely eat or drink, and barely a grip on the present. Like his anchor to time had come loose and he'd frequently end up in the crash of war or the ebb of courting my grandmother. The fast-paced hum of his days as an auctioneer. 

I hadn't seen him since Christmas, where I watched him fumble with a prawn my dad had brought him and then, when we were alone, listened as he told me with a certainty I hadn't heard in him in a long time, that he wanted to die. That he was beyond ready. 

I don't mean this post to eulogise or to soliloquy as such, more I'm just trying to arrange my own thoughts, comfort myself in a text box and the ticking nerve centre of the internet. Maybe that's a weird thing to do. I just know that it feels right just now, to try and capture parts of my grandfather in his last moments so that I can be rid of the skeletal, frail man I knew over the last year and remember the more vibrant one. The one with the quick grin and sly humour, who could talk for hours on end about aeroplanes and who had the sharp tongue of a man who survived wartime and divorce and remarriage and the loss of three brothers. Who married my grandmother and adopted my father and my sister and brother and I along with it. I want to remember his kindness most of all, I guess, and the steadiness of him. The reliability of him. I want to remember my grandad.  

That's all.  

Sunday Short: High Tide by Kristin Kemper

High Tide from Kristin Kemper on Vimeo.

Ah! How sweet is this short film by Kristin Kemper? She mentions on her channel that she'd filled it with things she loved - merpeople, school kids with magical secrets and hermit crabs and, well, I'm pretty damn on board with all of those things. This is an utterly charming short film and the perfect start to a Sunday. Definitely watch it in HD!

A Book a Week in 2014: 'Love in the Time of Cholera' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (10/52)

Fermina Daza and Dr. Juvenal Urbino have been married for half a century when Urbino dies suddenly in a domestic incident involving a parrot and a misstep. Fermina finds her life drastically changed, less by being a widow, but by the sudden reappearance of her first love, Florentino Ariza, who turns up on her doorstep - and in her life - the same day they put her husband in the ground.

So, look. I have such mixed feelings on this novel. Marquez is a brilliant writer, that much is pretty darn hard to deny. His ability to capture a moment, an atmosphere, a feeling is virtually unparalleled and leaves you both emotionally and physically affected by his writing - a pretty awesome feat in itself. I liked Fermina and, well, kind of liked Urbino and Ariza too, who orbited Fermina like moons throughout all of their lives.

That said, I feel like there's this whole generation of literature that's been wrongly interpreted as romantic. Lolita is probably the most obvious / worst example of this, but I can't help but feel the same way about Love in the Time of Cholera. The romance of it has a much more thorough basis in obsession than in love, and Florentino's degree of infatuation is really stalkerish throughout the story, particularly when he starts to project Fermina onto other relationships.

I don't know, between this and Miranda July's collection, I'm feeling like such a Debbie-downer! It's a good novel though, and one definitely worth the read, just not my favourite classic.

3.5 out of 5 chatty parrots.