Peter and the Wolf

Picture inspired by reading the short story by Angela Carter - Peter and the Wolf - in this story, a girl's parents are killed and she is raised by wolves, her cousin encounters her twice, once when they are both children, and later as adults. At the second meeting he is about to enter a seminary when he encounters her by a river with two cubs in tow, after seeing her and her 'natural state' he loses his religion. It is a great story the description of a wolf woman is stunning.

Carter and Space

I came across this passage by Angela Carter which I find very interesting. I had given no consideration really to how we fit into buildings or how they affect us until I was recently pointed to Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space.
Certainly I know that to create large works of art (large in any sense) you need space (both physical and time), but how constrained one was or wasn't physically I did not think would affect how you worked, but now I am convinced it does.

Conversely and personally I thought being in a large expanse as in Australia would allow/prompt me to make larger works, but the opposite has happened, my pictures (and writings) were always on the small side but here they have if anything gotten even smaller.

Angela Carter

I have lately been reading the collected short stories of Angela Carter I had forgotten how impossibly good she was at times, indeed there was a time when people discussed her work, films were made of her stories, numerous theses were written and her influence wide. But she seems now to have completely fallen off the map. But still her refashioning of European fairytale and folklore is obvious as an influence on writers I read now like Gaiman and Willingham. Maybe she is discussed still, but I don't hear of it as I'm Antipodean bound, and the only literary discussion I get to hear here is:
Oh the new Peter Carey's not very good is it (to which I disagree, but without enthusiasm)
and
Oh isn't the new Tim Winton marvellous (this is of course said in the sure knowledge that neither of us will actually read his work).

Carted died in 1992 and I presume also that once a writer is dead that they fall away from attention, it happens to so many, who now reads Angus Wilson (that great gay stylist of the heart), Anthony Burgess (ignored apart from his least work A Clockwork whatever) or Stevie Smith (now reduced to a one liner - not waving but drowning) all of whom were considered up until the 1980s as incomparable in their oeuvre. But I suppose that is the way, some writers fade as they must and make way for the new. Who indeed remembers and has bothered to read all the one time greats of even the earlier part of the last century, HG Wells, JB Priestley, Laurie Lee, Grahame Greene, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley etc. etc. - oh yeh, I forgots that would be me.