Man Of Steel and Other Finds

Last night i watched on DVD Man Of Steel, the latest version of the Superman story. Verdict - terrific!

It was one of the finds from my charity shop visit in Twydall yesterday.

So aoart from these DVD's  i also picked up a paperback and a CD.




It was a good day hunting. 

Friday Musical Selection

So, another selection of fine tunes starting with this cool tango indused number -

Caro Emerald - Tangled Up

The Stylistics - Batcha By Golly Wow

Tower Of Power - So Very hard To Go

Then Lenny went solo after the band split.

Lenny Williams - You Got Me Running (Re-Construction Mix)

Enjoy

Book 52 - Angela Carter "The Bloody Chamber"

Angela Carter "The Bloody Chamber" (Vintage)







“For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff's pillow — we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quite Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it's been fun or it's been not. So all cats have a politician's air; we smile and smile and so they think we're villains”

“His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.”

“This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero.”

“Although her father had told her of the nature of the one who waited for her, she could not control an instinctual shudder of fear when she saw him, for a lion is a lion and a man is a man and, though lions are more beautiful by far than we are, yet they belong to a different order of beauty and, besides, they have no respect for us: why should they? Yet wild things have a far more rational fear of us than is ours of them, and some kind of sadness in his agate eyes, that looked almost blind, as if sick of sight, moved her heart.”

There's lots to like in this collection of fairy-tale-based stories. She has subverted the traditional stories by emphasizing the underlying sex and violence, all with a melodic, poetic style of writing. For me, her take on "The Werewolf" and Little Red Riding Hood in "The Company of Wolves" (made into a movie) were the most successful, along with the charming, in its way, "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon", from which the last quotation above is taken.

While I enjoyed the fine writing, I wasn't transported into her worlds in some of the others. However, i am glad I read it; what she does here is unusual and skilled as her prose is beautiful, intricate, with a slightly anachronistic style of writing, which is always perfectly in place and never ever pretentious.