Walking The High-Wire

Colum McCann's wonderful novel Let The Great World Spin - weaving together the threads of the lives of New Yorkers connected in loose ways by Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974 - deserved to have won the National Book Award this week. Humane and compassionate, it rendered the beauty and fragility of human lives and, particularly in the characters of radical monk Corrigan and opera-loving Gloria, conveyed the everyday beauty of people motivated to help and care for those in desparate need of it.
The book seems to have been written not just in homage to Petit's astounding, beautiful act of artistic defiance, but in its spirit. Nothing could match Petit's act, whereby he appeared to transcend the limits of what a human is capable of as he didn't simply walk, but danced, on a wire stretched so far above bystanders that he seemed like a speck in the sky. It was unforgettable and unrepeatable: an act of perfect, illegal funambulation that seemed like an enchantment and could only have been performed by a magician. Petit's own account, To Reach The Clouds, is a breathlessly inspiring account of a unique obsession. James Marsh's 2008 Man On Wire, filmed like a heist movie, is full of spell-binding images that show the impossible being achieved by painstaking degrees.
Let The Great World Spin's main characters never leave the ground, although he evokes Petit as he prepares for the walk in a state between rapture and workmanlike concentration. But McCann makes the reader see how an act of beauty can be transformative and redemptive, and the figure of Petit, almost invisible as he balances over the world below, is a symbol of hope in the world McCann evokes of unbelievable pain and equally inconceivable compassion.

Love Bites

Emily Bronte must be turning in her grave to see the paperback edition of Wuthering Heights brought out to tie in with the bloodlust for all things Twilight and branded 'Bella and Edward's favourite book.' The sweet, fey teen lovers of the Twilight world - one vampire, one human, as the genre dictates - have evidently not been reading Emily Bronte's tale of doomed lovers properly, or they would have noticed that Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliffe are properly gothic: as nasty a pair of pieces of doomed, destructive work as ever stalked a moor in darkness looking for trouble.
The cover of the new edition is saccharine and sickly: a luminous white crocus beaming its light across a bland back background. It's sufficient to have readers reaching for the sickbucket, and does nothing to prepare the gentle reader - because Twilight fans, whether teens or those rather more embarassingly elderly, are likely to be gentle, romantic souls - for the emotional carnage contained within. Wuthering Heights is one of the greatest, darkest romances ever written, but it is a terrible tale of two selfish, unpleasant people devasting each other's lives and those of everyone they meet in the process of consuming each other. If the Twilight tie-in edition of Wuthering Heights had the cover its contents merited, the floral decoration on the front would be either carnivorous, or a bouquet of barbed wire.

Welcome

Ladies and Gentlemen of an inquisitive persuasion, step this way to discover strange and wonderful scraps of cultural arcana from the past, the present and sometimes, the future.
Gypsy Rose T was inspired to launch her Cabinet Of Curiosities on an auspicious date: Halloween, and today's first post is dated Friday 13th. Here you will find oddities, peculiarities and acts of genius both real and imaginary; tales and chimeras that might be mysterious, maybe macabre and always more beautiful than useful. Nothing here will be ordinary; everything will be a treasure worthy of investigation and exploration. Take your chances and look inside the The Gypsy's box of tricks to uncover inspiration, excitement and all manner of unearthly delights