Galley Beggar Advent 2023

DECEMBER 12

eloise millar’S CULTURAL HIGHLIGHTS

ONE OF THE MANY GREAT THINGS ABOUT OUR AUTHORS is the way that they arrive with their own treasure troves of artists, writers, composers - and this year, (co)editing Noemi Kiss-Deaki’s Mary and the Rabbit Dream and Mark Bowles’s All My Precious Madness has introduced me to the baroque delights of Corelli (here’s his Christmas Concerto) and Beethoven’s Op. 132 (listen to the third movement here; exquisite).

Art-wise, the only thing missing from Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms (Tate Modern) was a giant sleigh bed for me to climb into and stay for several months. The show has proved so popular that it’s been extended again and again, and bookings are open until April 2024. If you can, go and see it; it’s a true slice of magic.

For the telly, 2024 said goodbye to two greats - Succession (of course) and the BBC's sublimely good-natured Ghosts - and I was delighted last week to find that you can watch the whole of Fanny Cradock’s Christmas With Fanny over on BBC iPlayer.

On reading, well - where to begin? Ben Myers’s Cuddy (recent winner of the Goldsmiths Prize) and Victoria Mackenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain - about the lives of St Cuthbert and Margery Kempe / Julian of Norwich, respectively - felt like perfect companion pieces. Two beautiful, delicate novels. I’ve also been working my way through the first volume of Virginia Woolf’s Diaries, a fantastic piece of publishing by Granta - though I still can’t quite get over how social Virginia and Leonard Woolf were. The door never seems to stop knocking; and always with people like Lytton Strachey and Mark Gertler and Katharine Mansfield. It’s exhausting just reading about it (also: how an earth did VW get her own writing done??).

Another book I read this year - one of the greatest books I’ve ever read - is Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. A Polish writer (though born in Ukraine), Borowski - who was part of the Underground in WWII Warsaw - was captured by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz in 1943, at the age of 21. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen is a collection of some of the stories that he wrote after Auschwitz was liberated; as to their substance, the best I can offer is what I wrote to one of our authors soon after I finished reading: “It’s an awful book: dreadful, brutal, stripped and stark and dehumanised and at times, almost impossible to read - and a great and terrible work of art. It is just incredible, and I also wish it had never been written. (Or maybe more that the world that it was written in didn’t exist.)” 

Read it everyone, please.

There’s also goodness and beauty in the world, thankfully - and I count myself lucky to have bought a last-minute ticket to see the Globe’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chaotic, frenetic, full of the abundance of life - an absolute joy.

Also: Just a few days ago I found out about a man called Wilson Bentley - or “Snowflake Bentley”, as he was also known. Have you heard of him? Bentley, who was brought up on a Vermont farm in the late nineteenth century, developed an enthusiasm for snowflakes when he was a teenager. Determined to record their infinite variety, he worked out a way of attaching a bellows camara to a compound microscope - and, catching snowflakes on cushions of black velvet, became the first known person to take detailed photographs of these “tiny miracles of beauty”. You can watch a short film about him here, buy his book Snow Crystals here, and I’ll leave you with a some of Bentley’s photographs below. Happy Christmas! 

ELOISE MILLAR is the co-director of Galley Beggar Press.