Michael Hall offers some 'ways into' the work of Beckett. It's worth it I think.

I'm going to Book Street in Mumbai in November.

"Some people like to go shopping, others like to see movies. I like to come here to buy books..."

Reading Women




Reading with someone else who's also reading is a special agreement, you could call it an erotic pact. It's a permitted space right at the centre of togetherness, a separate but still shared silence and concentration...

...You know when you can read with someone like this that you're truly at home, truly permitted to be yourself, with her or him. I love to read with someone else reading beside me - it's a profound agreement of company and breathing space, maybe one of the most intimate things you can do with anyone.

(Ali Smith in the Guardian.)

The photo is Lee Miller and her best friend Tanja Ramm, taken by Miller's father, Theodore Miller.

The article, from which the Smith quote is taken, is a delight: instead of reviewing Stefan Bollmann's Reading Women, women writers were asked to comment on some of the images contained within the book of, of course, women reading.

There is no one story and one story only by Adrienne Rich

The engineer's story of hauling coal
to Davenport for the cement factory, sitting on the bluffs
between runs looking for whales, hauling concrete
back to Gilroy, he and his wife renewing vows
in the glass chapel in Arkansas after 25 years
The flight attendant's story murmured
to the flight steward in the dark galley
of her fifth-month loss of nerve
about carrying the baby she'd seen on the screen
The story of the forensic medical team's
small plane landing on an Alaska icefield
of the body in the bag they had to drag
over the ice like the whole life of that body
The story of the man driving
600 miles to be with a friend in another country seeming
easy when leaving but afterward
writing in a letter difficult truths
Of the friend watching him leave remembering
the story of her body
There is the story of the mind's
temperature neither cold nor celibate
Ardent The story of
not one thing only.