1.
Stella Rimington dies, aged 90.

I recently read Secret Asset, an example of what Rimington called "a small 'lifting of the curtains' of a world that people know exists but don't know much about". But before she turned to writing, she was the director-general of MI5 (the first woman to hold this office), having climbed, as she put it, from the "typing pool to the top".

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2.
Wilkin Bautista, aged 12, shows us around his neighbourhood (Batey de San Luis, on the outskirts of Santo Domingo) in an exuberant little video.

All I know of the Dominican Republic comes from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.

Bautista's video gives us another little angle. As the written intro puts it: "The sugar mill towns... were built in the early 20th century to house workers -- particularly seasonal labourers from neighbouring Haiti. In the wake of the sugar industry’s decline in the region, these communities have faced crumbling infrastructure, poverty, a lack of job opportunities and limited access to education, electricity and clean water."

But Bautista is upbeat. There's hardship, but there's also joy. And philosophy: "There are people who have everything and have achieved nothing. But then there are people who have nothing and have achieved a lot."

Bautista talks about sugar, but also about festivals, baseball, solidarity and happiness, and spirits and brujos. He includes plenty of his beloved rap, and his footage is interspersed with animations inspired by local children's drawings. Definitely worth a watch.


Sugar on the other side of the world... The Madukismo Sugar Factory, Yogyakarta, 2013

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3.
Kate Jones isolates three key points that emerge from the writing rituals of Tove Jansson:

"Indulge in your obsessions...; be playful and follow your curiosity...; bring a sense of joy and wonder."

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4.
Also on the subject of writing, Claire Laporte teases out some of the flight metaphors in David Copperfield.

The Dickens adaptation I listened to a little while ago bypassed the character of Mr Dick completely. Space is always at a premium when you're converting a long book into a few hours' audio, but a couple of listeners regretted the omission, and according to Laporte, it does seem as though the odd, childlike Mr Dick has a lot to say about writing -- both the difficulties of staying on track, and the exhilaration of sending your words off into the ether (in his case in the shape of manuscript laboriously inscribed on a kite).

"The kite," says Laporte, "can be understood as a metaphor for that moment in the creative process when the writer releases what she has written and allows it to waft away into the mind of the reader. When David sees the clarity that Mr. Dick achieves by setting his tangled thoughts free to soar over the landscape, perhaps he absorbs something about the satisfaction that a writer can achieve by 'disseminating [his] statements.' This may be what inspires David, as a young adult, to become a writer, an occupation he takes up well into the novel." And David, of course, in many ways reflects the path of Dickens, his creator.

The flight metaphor returns when Mr Micawber acknowledges Copperfield's success as an author, and lauds his "soaring flight", his "Eagle course".

And conversely, there's that feeling of crashing back to earth when a book is completed. Laporte quotes Dickens's preface to David Copperfield, where he says that finishing a novel entails "dismissing some portion of [the author’s] self into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him for ever".

I doubt I'll ever experience that, because feeling that way involves actually finishing something...



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5.
Why has Donna Tartt's The Secret History never been made into a film?

One of Tartt's agents said in 2001, "If you don’t make the right deal for a book early on, it’s going to set you back a long time." And it seems that is pretty much what happened... There were a couple of attempts at film adaptations, but they were aborted for various reasons. Additionally, the filming of another Tartt novel, The Goldfinch, did not go easily, possibly confirming her doubts about the whole movie-making business. People who know the author claim she's no longer interested in seeing her first novel adapted for the screen. In a nutshell, it's still "the ultimate one that got away".

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6.
And, while we're on the subject of Dark Academia, its aesthetic apparently shows a clear line of descent from the Romanticism of the late 18th/early 19th centuries.

Lara Lopez Millan argues that the DA genre "is characterized by a fascination with literature, philosophy, knowledge, and, in particular, death, the passage of time, and nostalgia. Inspired by Romanticism, this subculture values ​​reflection on the transience of life, connection with nature, and the contemplation of death as an essential part of the human experience. Visually, the Dark Academia aesthetic is distinguished by its dark and melancholic colour palette: black, grey, brown, and burgundy. Clothing is influenced by traditional academic style, with blazers, wool sweaters, and thick scarves evoking the fashion of bygone eras. Its followers' favourite spaces include old libraries, historic university hallways, and rooms filled with dusty books. All of this creates an atmosphere of introspection and philosophical reflection. This ambience, charged with nostalgia, resonates with the melancholy of Romanticism, and its vision of death as an essential theme of thought and art." Check out the article for examples.

The DA trend also frequently references authors such as Byron, Keats, and Poe -- who themselves explore themes of death, beauty, and transience: "Dark Academia thus establishes a dialogue with Romanticism, sharing its philosophical vision of mortality and human destiny... It can be understood as a modern revival of Romanticism, adapted to a new cultural context, but maintaining the characteristic fascination with death, melancholy, and the philosophical contemplation of ephemeral existence."

Another reason, perhaps, that I find myself drawn in this direction...


You can't beat Oxford for the DA vibe...