{"id":2790,"date":"2022-11-14T19:49:38","date_gmt":"2022-11-14T19:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=2790"},"modified":"2023-01-08T22:09:30","modified_gmt":"2023-01-08T22:09:30","slug":"winter-ali-smith-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2022\/11\/winter-ali-smith-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"<i>Winter<\/i>  &#8211; Ali Smith, 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Read for Second Monday book group. I loved the<em> Christmas Carol<\/em> echoes &#8211; it starts with &#8220;God was dead: to begin with&#8221;  &#8211; but hated the Trumpish end: &#8220;<em>You\u2019re going to be saying Merry Christmas again, folks.<\/em>&#8221; And the protagonist Art who writes a column &#8220;Art in Nature&#8221;&#8230; it&#8217;s a little on-the-nose. Nonetheless, Smith is always a beautiful writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Short quotes<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>&#8220;That\u2019s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;Then his mother stops speaking and starts humming a tune and Art knows the doors of the reminiscence have closed, as surely as if the Reminiscence is a cinema or a theatre and the show is over, the rows of seats empty, the audience gone home.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Long quotes<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, imagine it like this, the optician says. Imagine I\u2019m a car mechanic and someone brings me in a car for a service, and it\u2019s a car from the 1940s, and I lift the lid and find the engine still nearly as clean as when it left the factory floor in (the optician checks her form) 1946, just amazing, a triumph.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You\u2019re saying I\u2019m like an old Triumph, Sophia says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Good as new, the optician (who clearly has no idea that a Triumph has ever been a car) says.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Those green things, white things, polystyrene. You\u2019re wrong, they\u2019re recyclable. They\u2019re free of whatever it is that\u2019s bad for it. It\u2019s not as bad as you\u2019d think. I quite like them. I do! No, it\u2019s interesting, because, because they\u2019re so amazingly light, so that when you pick them up it\u2019s surprising every time. You always expect them to be heavier. Even if you tell yourself, even though you know they\u2019re light, you think you already know, you pick one up and it\u2019s like, wow that\u2019s so light, it\u2019s like holding actual lightness. It\u2019s, like, the weight of your own hand just somehow got lighter. Like a bird\u2019s bones kind of light. If you pick up several, hold several so your hand\u2019s full of them, you look at your hand loaded with things and your eye can\u2019t understand it because although you can see that your hand\u2019s full of something it feels like almost nothing\u2019s in your hand.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">None of these things is happening here. They are all happening far away, elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>But they may as well be,<\/em> Iris says. <em>What does here mean anyway, I\u2019d like to know. Everywhere\u2019s a here, isn\u2019t it?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">In this book I learned<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.artnet.com\/artists\/edouard-boubat\/petite-fille-aux-feuilles-mortes-jardin-du-8D9-mVguS2Q0f6ibuezb8A2\">Petite fille aux feuilles mortes<\/a> &#8211; One of Smith&#8217;s trademarks is referencing artworks, which she does skillfully and not annoyingly.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Hlbu6SsjlSE\">Elvis with a puppet!<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Read for Second Monday book group. I loved the Christmas Carol echoes &#8211; it starts with &#8220;God was dead: to begin with&#8221; &#8211; but hated the Trumpish end: &#8220;You\u2019re going to be saying Merry Christmas again, folks.&#8221; And the protagonist Art who writes a column &#8220;Art in Nature&#8221;&#8230; it&#8217;s a little on-the-nose. Nonetheless, Smith is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quote-dump","category-second-monday-book-group"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2790"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2916,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2790\/revisions\/2916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}