About Armaduras

Location: London

Home Region:
Europe :: England :: London

Age:26

Website: http://leaf-pile.blogspot.com/

Favorite novels: My favourite books have a sort of presence in the world, a singularity. A really great novel should have mass appeal in the way that a natural fissure full of trees and ancient caves should have – a break in the terrain, natural and still bizarre, impossible to explore quickly or maybe ever in a lifetime. The first book I ever loved which wasn’t part of my childhood obsession with The Wizard of Oz was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and its sister (hard to think of it as merely a sequel), Through The Looking Glass. Inexhaustibly peculiar, witty, human while still glassily inhuman, clever, atmospheric, unmistakable. After Roald Dahl, my first favourite writer was probably Jeanette Winterson: I think Sexing the Cherry is one of her ripest and most delicious books, and has that perfect mix of ghostliness and mundanity, meeting in the play of language. Similarly, all of Russell Hoban’s novels are worth your time, but Turtle Diary especially manages to balance air and concrete. Moominpappa at Sea, The Borrowers, and The Children of Green Knowe are each stories about living with the characters in stories; light without being delicate, sad without being saddening. The Master and Margarita, and Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem are wild, atmospheric little chambers of myth and invention. I could list a lot more but I’ve decided not to do lists this year.

Favorite writers: I like writers who write a lot of short books. Bigger books have a place, but they tend to be more indulgent, less focussed, less intimate, and they can’t sustain experiment. You can’t hide things so much in short books, and it’s more difficult to keep them from being simplistic. A really skilful short novel has the texture of a William Morris embroidery – you have the satisfaction of seeing the structure of the book, the detail in perfect focus, the pleasure of the colour without it overwhelming you, and within that you can find surprises and strange intentions, and understand why they’re there. I also like a book with a world in it, rather than a story – quite often you need a story, as part of the deal, so I like the occasional reminder that story in itself is contrivance, or rather that one single story is just a contrivance, and that actually we’re overflowing with them, and that the narratives we structure them by are rarely organic and usually have some idea behind them. I would therefore put Jeanette in this box, Russell, Tove, and add the fantastic Frank Cottrell Boyce, Gary Indiana, Paul Magrs, Elizabeth Bowen, Woolf obviously, Carter, Ali Smith, and WG Sebald as well, and Michael Rosen, and Grace Paley, who haven’t necessarily written ‘novels’, along with Iain Sinclair, MR James, and Borges.

Favorite music: Olafur Arnolds, PJ Harvey, Bjork, Cocteau Twins, Johan Johansson, Arthur Russell

Non-noveling interests: I like books – I have too many of them, but this year I’ve been working on that, and slowly I’ll get to the point where I can go into bookshops again without wincing. I think my favourite state to be in is deeply asleep exploring a really fantastic dream, and most things I like in the real world are the things that recall that state, usually in ways that provoke that feeling of homesickness and mystery. But I hate the idea of being closed in on myself, and I love the idea of community and how it can be made to operate in a healthy and happy and interesting way. Ever since Flickr came up with that term it uses for the ranking of pictures, I see things in terms of ‘interestingness’; I like folktales and myths; I like the weird and wonderful adventures of Doctor Who, along with people like Anansi and Baron Munchausen; I love experiments and communes and Intentional Communities, and that terrible idea of Utopia. I love a good ghost story, a rummage in a library, a flan about a city, especially London, and a scramble through the countryside; I always want to look inside just about any house I walk by, and I make do with civic buildings and old houses open to the public, and pubs and nice cafes and parks and views from trains. I love the story of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, and what they tried to do at Charleston Farmhouse. I’d love to be a parent or a teacher or a school librarian; I’m always interested in how children might be brought up, because I still go back to my childhood and the view of the world I had then, which was open and wild and free and already mysteriously shaped by something I can’t explain.