Latest news with #CharlotteWood
Sydney Morning Herald
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Is it just me, or is everyone rude now? (It's not just me)
The woman, seated a chair or two away at the Sydney Writers' Festival, leaned over to me when the session had finished. She said: 'Do you always fidget, or do you have a particular problem today?' What? I hadn't been aware that I'd been fidgeting. Perhaps I'd been moving my new knee a little, just to take pleasure in the fact that my leg now works. But the movement would have been minimal. And she was seated a half a metre away. I'm always discombobulated when someone is rude to me. I think most people are. Minutes later, I ran into the writer Sydney writer Charlotte Wood. I told her about the nasty comment and how I'd been lost for words. Well, worse than lost for words. Instead, I'd put on a plummy English accent – why the accent? – and said, 'Madam, if I disturbed you in any way, I do apologise', and then stomped off (to the extent that a man with a new knee can stomp anywhere.) I asked Charlotte 'how come I was unable to come up with something better?' 'That's nothing,' said Charlotte. 'Someone was having me sign their book, and just as they were leaving, they examined me closely and said: 'So, whose idea was the hair?'' Charlotte is a wordsmith of dazzling skill. Her most recent book was shortlisted for last year's Booker Prize. Reviewers praise her wit. Surely, Charlotte would have come up with a zinger, even if I'd failed to manage one. Not a bit of it. She reports responding with a nervous half-laugh, a strange surge of shame – maybe the reader is right! - before quickly turning to the next customer in the queue.
The Age
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Is it just me, or is everyone rude now? (It's not just me)
The woman, seated a chair or two away at the Sydney Writers' Festival, leaned over to me when the session had finished. She said: 'Do you always fidget, or do you have a particular problem today?' What? I hadn't been aware that I'd been fidgeting. Perhaps I'd been moving my new knee a little, just to take pleasure in the fact that my leg now works. But the movement would have been minimal. And she was seated a half a metre away. I'm always discombobulated when someone is rude to me. I think most people are. Minutes later, I ran into the writer Sydney writer Charlotte Wood. I told her about the nasty comment and how I'd been lost for words. Well, worse than lost for words. Instead, I'd put on a plummy English accent – why the accent? – and said, 'Madam, if I disturbed you in any way, I do apologise', and then stomped off (to the extent that a man with a new knee can stomp anywhere.) I asked Charlotte 'how come I was unable to come up with something better?' 'That's nothing,' said Charlotte. 'Someone was having me sign their book, and just as they were leaving, they examined me closely and said: 'So, whose idea was the hair?'' Charlotte is a wordsmith of dazzling skill. Her most recent book was shortlisted for last year's Booker Prize. Reviewers praise her wit. Surely, Charlotte would have come up with a zinger, even if I'd failed to manage one. Not a bit of it. She reports responding with a nervous half-laugh, a strange surge of shame – maybe the reader is right! - before quickly turning to the next customer in the queue.
BBC News
18-03-2025
- General
- BBC News
Charity wants to repair Leighton Pumping Station after fire
A charity wants to remove part of a pumping station destroyed by a fire as part of repair Pumping Station's roof collapsed into the store room and smaller pump room when the listed building in Linslade, Bedfordshire, was set deliberately alight in Canal & River Trust has asked Central Bedfordshire Council for Listed Building Consent to dismantle the fire-damage remains and install new pump control building consent is needed as the pump house, which dates back to 1838, is connected to the neighbouring Leighton Lock Cottage, which is Grade II listed. The cottage and pumping station were initially owned by the Junction Canal were then owned by The British Waterways Board before it became the Canal & River cottage, which was listed in 1993, was sold in 2005 but the pumping station remains in the ownership of the trust. In its proposal, the trust said it would re-instate all above-ground, three-phase switch gear and pump control would also remove timber trusses, metal fittings and loose bricks from the top of the building's works also included the removal of vegetation and fire debris from the interior of the process would be completed under the supervision of Albion Archaeology to asses items that can be salvaged. Charlotte Wood, Canal & River Trust head of operations for London & South East said the the building was "severely damaged in an arson attack which also destroyed the modern pumping equipment inside".She added: "Our charity has submitted a Listed Building Consent application, seeking permission to carry out works to make the structure works will involve detailed recording of the fire-damaged roof trusses by accredited archaeologists, prior to the careful removal of burnt structural roofing timbers."Once our contractors can safely access the building, we will then be able to progress to the next phase of work and prepare detailed plans for reinstating new pumps that are needed to provide water to the canal once again." Follow Beds, Herts and Bucks news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
New York Times
10-02-2025
- General
- New York Times
An Exquisite, Wrenching Novel of Leaving Your Life Behind
The mice are everywhere. Rooting through the chicken feed and the lettuce bed and the compost bucket; running up bedposts and bare legs; spewing from cars and church organs; waves of small bodies scurrying across paved roads like 'a wide river of silver water.' Where there aren't mice, there are their effects: electrical cords and bags of flour torn apart; magpies dead after eating the poisoned carcasses; a nest inside an old piano, woven from pieces of felt chewed off its hammers. The sounds of their scratching in the walls 'like dried leaves falling.' It has a ring of magical realism to it, but the rodent infestation in Charlotte Wood's somber, exquisite seventh novel, 'Stone Yard Devotional,' is nonfiction. In 2021, as the world faced the Covid pandemic, eastern Australia was contending with an additional contagion — a great surplus of mice ravaging crops and communities alike, thanks to heavier-than-normal rains and warmer temperatures that pushed the crisis further and further south. That crisis is just one of three 'visitants' to arrive on the doorstep of Wood's unnamed narrator, an atheist in her 60s who has left behind her husband and her career as a wildlife conservationist in Sydney to live in a convent near her rural hometown in New South Wales. The second is a casket carrying the bones of Sister Jenny, a nun who disappeared 20 years earlier, after abandoning the convent to run a women's shelter in Bangkok. The third, a childhood classmate named Helen Parry, whom the narrator once bullied, has since become a nun herself, though of the celebrity-activist kind the other nuns don't trust. Any one of these arrivals on its own would be enough to puncture the fantasy of 'escape' the narrator seeks among this sisterhood, but together their confluence descends on the novel with the force of a biblical flood. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year (the novel was published in 2023 in Australia and England), 'Stone Yard Devotional' is the diary of a person with more days behind her than ahead, tired of trying and failing to rescue the planet from man-made destruction, wanting to make her way home. Apocalypse is not so much the plot of the book as its anchor, grounding the novel's ruminations on forgiveness and regret, on how to live and die, if not virtuously, then as harmlessly as possible. The novel is, in many ways, an extended meditative vigil. At the convent, in place of noise and action there is what the nuns call prayer, and the narrator simply calls thinking. Short chapters often begin in the present and then digress into episodes from the narrator's mostly stable, untroubled past. Here is her mother composting before it was cool and visiting with a blind woman in her trailer for hours at a time. Here is the narrator in a high school sewing class, ganging up on the 'friendless' Helen Parry while knowing the girl is being ritually abused and abandoned by her poor, single mother. These memories appear and recede as fluidly as human thoughts, without reason or chronology or obvious connection to what's happening outside her head (mostly emptying mouse traps, taking meals, spats between sisters, chasing government permissions to bury Sister Jenny's remains). A part but not one of them, the narrator witnesses the nuns' rituals, the circadian rhythms of the liturgy, with the receptive curiosity of the hypnotized, or the converted. 'But how do they get anything done?' she thinks, Wood's sedate, unpretentious prose bending sparingly, invitingly, into the outsider's wry humor. 'All these interruptions day in, day out, having to drop what you're doing and toddle into church every couple of hours. Then I realized: It's not an interruption to the work; it is the work. This is the doing.' Distance from the world is no antidote to the narrator's despair; it merely gives her room to acknowledge it. She's forlorn about her parents' deaths more than 30 years ago; about her dissolving marriage; about her increasing disillusionment with her Threatened Species Rescue Center. 'At every step of my every attempt I have only worsened the destruction,' she decides. 'Every email, meeting, press release, conference, protest. Every minuscule action after waking means slurping up resources, expelling waste, destroying habitat. … Whereas staying still, suspended in time like these women, does the opposite. They are doing no harm.' Well, except for the nun wielding a leaf blower outside her window; or the 'morally appalling' task of drowning mice in buckets of water; or the racist hatred she feels emanating from a particularly dogmatic nun. Except for the Aboriginal cultures displaced and the mass graves around the world that spring to her mind when she buries a chick found dead from frost. 'I thought of those babies and those poor girls, and the savagery of the Catholic Church came flooding in once again. Yet here I am. Wrestle, wrestle.' The wrestling in this novel is with the nature and meaning of penance, atonement. Upon learning that Helen will be the one to transport Sister Jenny's bones back to Australia, the narrator recalls their last encounter, decades ago, at a protest against logging. It's an excruciating scene of absolution sought and denied, of quiet humiliation: 'I told her that I was to this day ashamed of what we had done, and that I was deeply sorry for my part in it,' she says, but it takes Helen a minute to even remember her. 'I can see why that might have been a big … incident … for you,' she finally replies, as intimidatingly self-assured now as she was as a child. 'But for me, that day was nothing.' Activism, abdication, atonement, grace: In this novel no one of these paths is holier than another; Wood is more invested in noticing the human pursuit of holiness itself. 'Not denounced, not forgiven,' the narrator and her sins swing in the uncomfortable uncertainty of the living. Nothing can exempt a person from this moral stain, from mortality — not even being a nun on the edge of the earth.
Washington Post
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Stone Yard Devotional' is as extraordinary as you've heard
Given the monastic pacing of Charlotte Wood's 'Stone Yard Devotional,' I suppose it's appropriate that we've had to wait patiently for it. Wood's fellow Australians have been praising this story about a small abbey of nuns since the novel was published in 2023. Last year, it was a finalist for Britain's Booker Prize. And now, as though publishing were operating by steam ship, 'Stone Yard Devotional' has finally arrived in the United States.
