A Round-Up of Things Read Lately ...

I loved this possible love story out of New Zealand.

I'm absolutely enjoying The Pa Boys movie.  I'll post an interview with the writer/director at the end.

I enjoyed this story: Bringing a Daughter Back from the Brink With Poems.

And this ...  Ballet Dancers in Random Situations.

The stories of refugees are, almost always, heartbreaking but we don't often get to read of them in our everyday news, so I'll share the story of Mazhar.

I photographed Sinan Antoon while I was working in Berlin, and listened to him speak.  I will find his book, The Corpse Washer.

I have been introduced to a new blogger.  He made me smile with this story.

And then there was this: Over 200 works of Marc Chagall have been gathered worldwide for this major retrospective exhibition to discover from 28 February to 28 June 2015.  In Brussels.

I have interesting friends on Facebook and so these mostly come from there, then it's also where I share.   This morning it seemed like an idea to share over here too. 

Perhaps there's something for you ...

Ralph Fiennes, by Julie Kavanagh.

On performing Oedipus ...

Now Fiennes’s fear was palpable, with a physical language of agony, like a Bacon painting; his barely audible “Not yet, not yet” sparking the ineffable shiver released by a great performance. The audience was silent, drawn into the moment, but at the end let rip with whoops and whistles, recalling the cast on stage again and again. Sophie Fiennes went twice and said that one performance was the most extraordinary she had ever seen. “It was not acting, it was being. It was a leap of faith, like jumping from one building to another. Ralph had dared to enter that state. Afterwards I told him, ‘Jini’s certainly gone to heaven now!’ Because she would have loved the play, she would have loved his courage on that night.

From Two Years With Ralph Fiennes, by Julie Kavanagh.

A brilliant article, a brilliant man and the photographer too ... I had to put it someplace safe.

Photograph Jillian Edelstein.

Katherine Mansfield - a symposium on Flanders Fields.

Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.

Katherine Mansfield ... one of my favourite New Zealand writers, the only writer Virginia Woolf ever envied, a woman who truly went out there and lived life. 

Stylistically, the influence of Katherine’s writing was profound. Virginia wrote: “You seem to me to go so straightly and directly – all clear as glass – refined, spiritual…” After Katherine’s death she confided to her diary it was: “the only writing I have ever been jealous of.”

She was a remarkable woman left out of all of my school curriculums - a fact that stuns me now that I realise just how remarkable she was, both as a writer and as a woman.

Anyway, September 26-27, 2015 ...