Occasionally we take a day off at Mirabile Dictu.
Or perhaps a week off.
Or perhaps two weeks off.
Or perhaps a month off.
We’ve never done this before, but I plan to take at least the weekend off.
First, here is a Friday night post: the Ten Faves Self-Interview. If you have time to answer one or two or all, please leave a comment.
Are you ready? Here is my Q&A.
Ten Faves Self-Interview
Q 1. What is your favorite work of art?
Jean-Louis Forain’s “Woman in a Cafe” (1885). Forain liked to paint “the world of the café, brothel, racetrack, ballet and other aspects of modern Parisian life in the late nineteenth century,” according to the self-guided tour in the exhibition, “Renoir to Chagall: Paris and the Allure of Color” at the Joslyn Art Museum.
Q 2. What is your favorite band?
R.E.M.
Q3. What is your favorite classic of all time?
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
Q4. What is your favorite film?
Days of Heaven, directed by Terence Malick, starring three of the most beautiful actors of the 1970s, Brooke Adams, Richard Gere, and Sam Shepard.
Q5. What is your favorite novel?
Pamela Hansford Johnson’s Helena trilogy, Too Dear for My Possessing, An Avenue of Stone, and A Summer to Decide.
Q 6. What is your favorite nonfiction book?
Peter Stothard’s Alexandria: The Last Nights of Cleopatra
Q7. What is your favorite poem?
Horace’s Ars Poetica
Q8. What is your favorite book review publication?
TLS
Q9. What is your favorite TV show?
Parks and Recreation.
Q10. What is your favorite Virago?
Molly Keane’s Good Behavior
And optional Q11? What is your favorite rock song? Driver 8



Thank you for reminding me of Pamela Hansford Johnson. I’ve loved and reread many of her books, but I’ve never read the Helena trilogy and, hooray our local library has ‘Too dear for my possessing’ … what a title!
By the way you can travel from London to Oxford by ‘the Oxford Tube’, it’s a bus service, city centre to city centre, every ten minutes or so twenty-four hours a day and much cheaper than the train. I hope you have a great trip.
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I love Pamela Hansford Johnson, and this is one thing I’m looking forward to in London: trying to find titles I don’t have! I think I do have most of them, but there are a couple I don’t have. And some very nice person from England sent me a copy of The Bed Thy Centre. Unfortunately I changed email addresses and no longer know who this was. (I did thank her back then, though.)
I’ve got some maps with tube signs everywhere, so I’m looking forward to good transportation.
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P.S. And, Jane, thanks for the tip about getting to Oxford!
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