Read and Seen — February 2020

Responses to Keep Going and Hilda and the Troll (left) and False Colours (right)

Books:

• Keep Going — Austin Kleon (good, but personally I found Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work less diffuse and more resonant).
• False Colours — Georgette Heyer (so utterly gentle, and my favourite combination of high-stakes-for-characters/low-stakes-for-readers — see also Arabella and those productions of Twelfth Night where Orsino works out Viola’s deal pretty early on). The hero’s mother, Lady Amabel, irritates some of my friends but I love her, which might be partly attributable to Phyllida Nash’s beautiful narration: False Colours on Audible).
• Hilda and the Troll — Luke Pearson (so charming — I already loved the series, and the clean distinct style, which is coming into focus here)
• Hilda and the Midnight Giant — Luke Pearson (see above, and they started me thinking more about visuals and stylisation — and trolls and giants and, of course, trollish giants)
• The Creeps — Fran Krause (perfect bite-size frights, alarms, and nervous laughs: excellent sequel to the equally excellent Deep Dark Fears, and together with Lynda Barry’s Syllabus refined the Pearson thoughts into smaller, four-panel formats — see also the Deep Dark Fears tumblr)
• British Prints from the Machine Age — Stephanie Lussier (I’m trying to actually sit down and read through art books occasionally)
• His Countess for a Week — Sarah Mallory
• Certain Manuscripts for Secret Illustration Purposes

Some individual panels

I did some little comic responses to various books and films, but they got out of hand and cross-pollinated. These are a few individual panels. They’re all a bit Luke Pearson/Fran Krause inflected, with some distant False Colours DNA (top left), a dash of Emma (top right), some Machine Age (bottom left), and some sort of Birds of Prey/Sarah Mallory mash-up (bottom right).

Movies:

• Birds of Prey (fun and bright, and just a slightly different eye on things)
• Emma. (fun and bright, but not quite enough of a different eye on things for what I wanted from it; great music, excellent supporting Nighy; also there’s an image that is shown in the first lecture of a subject I tutor, and I burst out laughing when I saw it (partially!) repeated in the film — Luxury or The Comforts of a Rumpford, a deliberate reference, h/t Peter for the link).

Other:

• David Suchet, Poirot and More: A Retrospective (fascinating explanations, particularly of character notes, finding the right voice, the speed at which Freud would have walked, and rituals of exit)
• The New Pornographers, at The Triffid (I know, Mother, I know!) (a lovely show, and they feel a lot more rock when heard live; also, for reasons, I was playing a listening game and am now convinced that while it would be tricky, it would be possible to make a rock opera of Emma).

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