2.15.2007
A Flash of Flesh
Oh the hooplah over Daniel Radcliffe and Equus... Here, the Guardian asks how is it that on-stage nudity still has the power to shock.
Loaning Books
Does the question, "Say, can I borrow that book when you're done?" fill you with cold fear? Then you and this Guardian blogger might get along: his advice matches that of Polonious: "Neither a borrrower nor a lender be [when it comes to books]."
Open Season on Cleopatra
The Guardian talks about "The fact that launched a thousand quips" and a coin that turned up with Cleopatra's image (unsurprisingly, she doesn't look like Liz Taylor).Here's a link to an earlier Guardian article on this coin, too, that provides this picture.
Vision in the Desert
I could stop posting links about the Abu Dhabi museum project... but I won't. Here's the NY Times.
Amis at Manchester
From the Guardian:
To those who seek a career as a writer, Martin Amis has some well chosen words of advice.Yeah... I'll wait for the follow-up interview with his students before I believe that one. Read the whole article here.
"Well, it is a sort of sedentary, carpet slippers, self-inspecting, nose-picking, arse-scratching kind of job, just you in your study and there is absolutely no way round that. So, anyone who is in it for worldly gains and razzmatazz I don't think will get very far at all."
It's the method that worked for Amis, who is often described as Britain's greatest living author. And it just might inspire another one like him. Today, Manchester University will announce an academic coup: Amis has agreed to take up his first teaching role as its professor of creative writing, a decision that will bring the one-time enfant terrible of British literature, author of 11 novels, including Money and London Fields, firmly into the literary establishment.
Speaking exclusively to the Guardian ahead of today's announcement, Amis admitted that he hopes a new novel will germinate during his time as a professor.
He also insisted that, despite his reputation as an caustic and unforgiving critic, he will be a generous tutor.
2.14.2007
Strange Maps
Thanks to MUG for forwarding this blog along that contains some strange maps... it's fun to browse in your downtime.
Valentine Love Poetry Quiz
Wondering what poem to give your beloved today? Let the Guardian help you with its quiz.
Library Card VS. Plane Ticket
More on the discuss of library cards versus plane tickets in the wake of Stef Penney's win. Here's the Guardian musing on books that have taken place in locations where the author has never been and this is also the Guardian, but it's the comment section.
Palmuk 'in fear for life'
Turkish novelist Orhan Palmuk is believed to be living in the United States with no set date for his return to his home in Turkey, self-exiled after threats on his life.
Top 10 Happily Ever Afters
Happy Valentine's Day! To celebrate, the Guardian book blogs discuss the top ten "happily ever after"s in literature.
2.13.2007
Harry Potter and the Never-Ending Torrent of Publicity
From the Guardian:
It's not even out for another five months, but Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in the series, is already at the top of Amazon bestseller list, from pre-orders alone. At number two is the adult edition (come July 21, when the book is published, every grown-up caught reading it deserves to be hit over the head with their own copy - and the book is predicted to be hefty).Read the rest of the article here.
The start of the trail of Potter-mania crumbs was laid out last year. In June, in a rare TV interview, JK Rowling said two characters would die in the final book (please, please, please let it be the wizard boy). In August, Rowling hinted that Ron and Hermione will end up together. Three months later, Rowling revealed the astonishing news that she had three titles for the book (rumoured to have included Harry Potter and the Polonium 210 trail and Harry Potter and the Racist Housemates). A month later, just when you thought the world would implode with collective excitement, the real title was revealed. Then Rowling revealed that she had had a dream featuring some of the waiters from the cafe in which she wrote large bits of book seven. Incredible!
Flashy Libraries
From the Comment section of the Guardian, Germaine Greer on libraries:
Every now and then a writer will be asked to nominate a favourite word, and out will come "magenta" or "elfin" or "thrash" or whatever else floats up through the murk. Writers cannot have favourite words because every word in its proper place is perfect, but, if there were to be a word that remains lovable for me, even when set adrift on meaninglessness, it would be "library". "Tea and buns" may be nice, but "tea and buns in the library" is rhapsodic. For all those unschooled girls over the centuries, who sat atop library ladders devouring their fathers' and brothers' books without permission, the library was Samarkand. Excitement, adventure, happiness bloomed in the sunlight filtered through tight-drawn linen blinds, as they gathered up treasure that no one could steal. The most adventurous, like Lady Mary Wortley, taught themselves Latin, so they could plunder Martial and Juvenal and Ovid, and learn as much about sex, drugs and rock'n'roll as their brothers knew. Libraries are places where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.This was the whole piece, but here's the link to it at the Guardian.
Dying of boredom in my parents' bookless house, I was tall enough at 13 to con my way into the Melburne public library. I didn't know how to use the catalogue or even what I wanted to read; I just grabbed a book, any book, off an open shelf, pulled a chair up to one of the red cedar desks that rayed out from the supervisor's high pulpit at the centre of the panopticon, clicked on the reading light in its green glass shade, and read away with might and main. Some of the people around me would fall asleep, their open mouths dribbling on to the green blotters, but I read on and on. There would be time to sleep on the long train journey, 16 stations, back to my beachside home.
Though they are the best way for the keeper of books to watch that his readers don't deface or damage books, panopticons are no longer in fashion. Libraries are no longer intimidating but inviting. Where once libraries went to considerable lengths to keep people out, now they struggle to entice all kinds of people in, the young, the poor, the lame, the blind. When Damilola Taylor was fatally wounded on the eve of his 11th birthday, he was on his way home from Peckham library where he was a member of the computer club. It's not unusual now for even quite little kids to hang out in libraries.
The boldness of Will Alsop's concept made Peckham library famous even before it was built. Now, deliberately unstable, a top-heavy box propped on wonky pins, half armoured in green copper, and half transparent, it has more than half a million visitors a year. There are baby and toddler sessions, teenage and adult reading groups, family reading groups, a homework help club, and a huge collection of music CDs and DVDs, with the bookish bit at the top, above the hubbub. It lends more than 300,000 items a year. As a structure, it collected a clanking list of prizes.
For an elderly bookworm like myself, the Peckham library is a bit challenging. Its top-heaviness seems to court catastrophe. I like my libraries stable, durable, serene. I am looking for adventure in the books, rather than in the building. More to my liking is a much humbler and friendlier building, the Johnston central library and Farnham centre, which opened six months ago in Cavan, in the Republic of Eire. Peckham library defies you to understand how it stays up, whereas the Cavan library is all elementary post and beam construction like the Royal Villa in Knossos.
Harmony in architecture created by lucidity of structure; the full-height atrium enables you to comprehend the full extent and mass of the Cavan library's components and how they fit together. Cement columns and piers support reinforced concrete beams, gently replicating the proportions of the golden mean; the glass doesn't feel like curtain walling but like windows. In the children's library on the ground floor, every glazed section has a window seat. The seats correspond to the age sections of the library, so brothers and sisters stop quarrelling about who goes where and divide naturally into age sets. Teenagers have funkier furniture and slightly more privacy in their windowed niche. A hundred small touches make the space seem like the library in a great house, where every family member could find a space.
Cavan library shares some important motifs with Peckham; the understorey is transparent, there is a sheltered space before it, and the quiet study areas are held aloft as they are in Peckham, but the building doesn't trumpet its cleverness. Like Peckham, it uses new technology in making the most of natural ventilation and light; it is heated by geo-thermal pumps and lit with low-energy bulbs. It may not flaunt a coat of costly copper, but its soft red bricks are handmade, its mortars and plasters lime, every bit as luxurious and rather less intimidating. Peckham library is inextricably connected with the huge creative ego of Will Alsop. Cavan library reminds you at every turn that it has taken shape after years of close collaboration between the community, the staff and the designer, whose name can be seen nowhere. She is Alice Bentley of Shaffrey Associates. If a community library's what you want, she's your man.
Aryndhati Roy Plans Return to Fiction
From Reuters:
Ten years after winning the Booker Prize for her first novel, and a decade as one of India's leading social and environmental activists, Arundhati Roy is planning a return to fiction.Read the whole article here.
The Not Published Yet Competition
From the Guardian:
In a development that will see bookshop assistants vaulting the checkouts and onto the shelves, a new writing competition exclusively for booksellers is launched today by National Book Tokens.Read the whole article here.
Inspired by the example of Sarah Waters and David Mitchell, who both worked as booksellers before becoming bestsellers, the Not Published Yet competition invites submissions from unpublished authors working in the book trade to win a publishing contract with Faber and Faber, and an advance of at least £2,000.
Romance Novels for ____
From the Post-Tribune:
This Valentine's Day, one publisher wants you to be the one doing the bodice-ripping.Read the whole article here.
Book By You says it sells thousands of personalized romance novels each year with titles such as ''ER Fever'' and ''Pirates of Desire,'' where the reader is the star. It's not Bronte, but customers are going crazy for the novels that make them the main characters.
2.12.2007
Mugglenet.com
Will there be a week that goes by where we don't discuss Harry Potter?
I didn't think so, either.
From the NY Times:
You might ask yourself now... "did she just post the whole article?" Yes, she did. Here's the link to the actual NY Times website, though.
I didn't think so, either.
From the NY Times:
Would you like to establish a major new religion? Then learn how to attract adherents by keeping people on the edge of their seats — or rocks, or sand dunes — their legs dangling over eternity. Tell a suspenseful story that builds to bigger and more mysterious questions. The deeper the questions the sharper the suspense — and the more tenacious the faith in waiting for the answer. Will your soul rise to heaven or fall to hell after death? When will the Messiah come?
Of course, a lot of us settle for a TV series or a sport — or, in exceptional cases, a transcendent episodic saga that poses its own big questions. (Will good vanquish evil?) A good story, no matter how modest, is a form of prayer.
One ultra-exceptional case of a transcendent episodic saga is the ongoing tale of Harry Potter; and a new unauthorized tie-in, “What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7,” both tackles and heightens the suspense that has been building through the six Potter books so far. The book’s audience is the 300 million readers who have been left hanging by J. K. Rowling since 2005, when “Harry and the Half-Blood Prince” came out. They yearn for answers to the countless riddles and perplexities that have proliferated up to now, but they do not pine for closure. Definitely not for closure.
Will Dumbledore, shockingly killed by Severus Snape at the end of Book 6, come back to life? Was the murder hatched with the complicity of Dumbledore, who had something up his embroidered sleeve? And what about Wormtail? He betrayed Harry’s parents as their friend Peter Pettigrew long ago, which led to their murder by Lord Voldemort. (And to Peter’s transformation into a literal rat.) Yet will he end up saving Harry from almost certain death at Voldemort’s hands simply by wanting to save his own sniveling skin? Wait a minute! Who said Harry was fated to be killed by Voldemort, anyway? His mother’s love protected him from the Dark Lord when he was a baby. Surely love will rescue him again. Won’t it?
The authors of “What Will Happen” run MuggleNet.com, a delightfully thorough and fanciful Web site devoted to all aspects of the world of Harry Potter. Though they self-deprecatingly call themselves Muggles — a Muggle is a person without the powers of a wizard — the authors of this rapt little volume appear to have magically transported every bit of information in the Potter epic into their own lively, teeming brains. They are as adept at parsing plot details as they are at anatomizing the characters’ motives and predicting their next steps. The founder of MuggleNet.com — established when he was 12 — even has a name right out of Hogwarts: Emerson Spartz. Spartz and his colleagues apply themselves to every question and conundrum that Rowling (or J.K.R., as they affectionately refer to her) has created and thus far left unresolved.
You realize something as you follow these fans through questions of loyalty (just how binding is the “life debt” that one wizard owes to another who saves his life?); of love (is it a lack of sexual tension that makes Harry and Hermione friends?); of self-esteem (“Neville’s early lack of skill may be nothing more than the result of meager self-confidence”). If Rowling’s genius lies in the replete, self-contained world she has created for young people, then to the extent that her readers have entered into this world, they partake of her imaginative genius.
To put it another way, Spartz and company aren’t jumping up and down on YouTube or sending out minute-by-minute dispatches about their state of mind on MySpace. They are traveling out of their own selves into someone else’s imagined universe, where they seem happy, even grateful, to find pieces of their lives without encountering the slightest reference to themselves.
There is something vulnerable about this self-forgetfulness, just as there is something touching about the book’s earnestness and occasional naïveté. For the authors, his half-Muggle parentage “proves that Snape wouldn’t dislike Lily just for being Muggle-born.” Addressing the eventuality that Rowling will, as she has claimed, make Book 7 the last in the Harry Potter series, the authors write: “As long as we have our imaginations, Harry Potter — and the Harry Potter community — will never die.” People like this often end up getting hurt by windmills.
Perhaps Rowling has multiplied all the betrayals and incidences of torture and murders for a reason. Perhaps she has made Hogwarts less and less a place of refuge, and more and more a site of factional strife, because she means to impart a lesson to her adherents by making her self-contained universe fall apart naturally, before she abandons it peremptorily. This is how the world really is, she could be saying.
Or maybe she is not saying anything precise at all. Either way, this wonderfully enthralled, believing, open book makes me hope that Rowling ends Harry’s story, when she does, with Yeats’s tender lines in mind: “I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
You might ask yourself now... "did she just post the whole article?" Yes, she did. Here's the link to the actual NY Times website, though.
Lynne Truss and Her Imitators
From the Independent:
Her irritation at bad grammar took Lynne Truss to the top of the literary bestseller lists with Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. Now, however, that irritation has turned to anger and disdain over a slew of parodies aimed at capitalising on her success.Read the whole article here.
In an outspoken attack on the wave of imitators who have spoofed the book's quirky title and cover design, Ms Truss said she did not know how publishers of such imitations "live with themselves".
Private Lives of Lady Novelists
From the Independent:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman in pursuit of a literary career will never find happiness with a husband, particularly if she writes about love.Read the whole article here.
Consider the list: Sylvia Plath, left by Ted Hughes for another woman, penning her last desperate poems before putting her head in the oven; Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and mother of Mary Shelley, throwing herself into the Thames after being let down by her lover; Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, drinking herself to death after three marriages.
Colette, creator of Gigi and Claudine, was locked in a room by her degenerate husband, forced to write stories in his name; Carson McCullers, writer of The Ballad of the Sad Café, was married twice to the same man, who then asked her to join him in a suicide pact. She fled but died at 50.
Mrs Gaskell, contentedly married to a Unitarian parson with whom she had a brood of children, is the exception that proves the rule: that it is compulsory for women who write, and particularly those who write well about love and marriage, to have peculiarly unrewarding, and certainly unconventional, private lives of their own.
How can we account for the high level of emotional casualties among those who have given us our most enduring love stories? It is well documented that the pressure of the job makes writers, male and female, famously hard to live with, but the cost for the woman writer has always been greater than it is for her male equivalent; not only is success harder to come by, but she suffers many more blows to the heart along the way. Do women writers have higher expectations than the rest of us when it comes to their own relationships, or is it that a commitment to writing leaves no room for anyone else?
It is a subject that is increasingly fascinating us, the readers. Now that all Jane Austen's novels, most of those by the Brontë sisters, and almost all of Edith Wharton's have been filmed and televised, our interest has turned to the private lives of the writers themselves. Next month sees the release of the biopic of Jane Austen, Becoming Jane, starring Anne Hathaway as the 20-year- old writer, falling in love for the one and only time in her life.
Later in the year, the film Brontë explores the emotionally tormented life of the young Charlotte, played by Michelle Williams. And no doubt a bidding war has already begun for the film rights to Hermione Lee's acclaimed new life of Edith Wharton, published last month. Their lives may make less romantic Valentine's Day reading than their novels.
2.11.2007
Not For Sale
This is a fantastic idea for a show... works of art that artists refuse to part with out of love.
2.10.2007
Anonymous Collection at the National Gallery of Art
From the NY Times:
When the Metropolitan Museum exhibited Leonardo da Vinci drawings in 2003, visitors had to stand in line to see individual works. While waiting, they could pass the time reading the wall labels, where amid the fine print the works’ lenders were listed. Most were auspicious collections: the Louvre, the Vatican, the Met, the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.Read the whole article here.
There are no lines at “Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings,” organized by curators at the Morgan Library & Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and no crowds. But neither the wall labels nor the catalog reveal where these works came from. The show is drawn entirely from an anonymous private collection.
Despite the veil of secrecy, a couple of things are obvious: the collector had significant capital for investing in old masters and either an exceptional eye or a good adviser (or both). The catalog discloses that “she” assembled the collection in only 11 years.
The Fantasy of Happily Ever After
From the Washington Post:
"Courtesan," which in a different age is probably what she [Anna Nicole Smith] would have been labeled (even though she was married), is a category we don't have much use for anymore. The woman who makes sexual alliances for money, who was less than a blushing bride but not so fallen as a prostitute, was once a vigorous cultural type, at least through the 19th century. Courtesans were the essential heroines of our greatest operas. They offered up their bodies, in various states of undress, to painters from Caravaggio to Toulouse-Lautrec -- and too many others to mention. It was a courtesan who set in motion many of our greatest novels, not least of them Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" -- which begins with the love of a man named Swann for a "great courtesan."Read the whole article about Anna Nicole Smith and how she "stripped marriage of its illusions."
But the idea of the courtesan has all but disappeared, and with it much of the nuance about our analysis of sex and marriage.
Our continuum of sexual alliances runs from the happy marriage of loving equals, on one end, to prostitution -- the pure exchange of sex for money -- on the other. The trophy bride, the marriage of youth and beauty to age and power, is the closest we have to the category of the courtesan -- but it involves the collective pretense that it isn't only about money. To see the old category of courtesanship in operation today, you have to travel to poor places around the globe, where sex, love and sometimes marriages are negotiated between wealthy westerners and local girls without either party acknowledging the idea that the exchange is commercial.The courtesan was rich but not on her own terms, an object of scorn but not completely disreputable, a living reminder of an economy of sexual exchange that we like to pretend doesn't exist. When Anna Nicole Smith, a voluptuous 26-year-old Playboy Playmate, married an octogenarian oil-rich billionaire, she crossed a line, assuming too high a place in our supposedly mobile society.
2.09.2007
Commonwealth Writers' Prize List
From the Guardian:
There was a familiar ring to the announcement of the shortlists for the first stage of the £10,000 Commonwealth writers' prize.Read the whole article here.
Booker contenders MJ Hyland and David Mitchell head the regional shortlist for the Commonwealth writers' best book award, nominated alongside fellow Booker nominees James Robertson and Naeem Murr for the £1,000 Europe and South Asia prize.
The Eurasian best first book award shortlist has a more unfamiliar aspect. Hisham Matar joins Gautam Malkani in contention for the £1,000 regional first book prize.
The two regional winners will be announced on March 6 2007. They will go forward, alongside six winners from the rest of the Commonwealth, for the £10,000 best book and £5,000 best first book award, announced in May.
Bacon Portrait Sold for £14m
From the Guardian:
A Francis Bacon painting, Study for Portrait II, sold for £14m at Christie's auction house yesterday - a record price for the artist.Read the article here.
Have library card, will travel.
The Guardian (on the heels of agoraphobic Stef Penney's Costa win with her book about Canada entirely researched via the British Library, perhaps?) discusses how a library card can take you further than an airplane ticket.
Hating Authors
The only book that I haven't ever finished is The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. We read it my senior year of high school and people repeatedly said, "If you don't know what it is to be a black man after reading this book, you'll never know." Now, reading this in a class of little white Catholic school girls, I was fairly certain that we'd never know what it was to be a black man, and from that point on, the novel and I were continuously at odds. It got to the point where my teacher actually told me to stop reading it because my negative opinions (while well thought-out and substinative) were making it impossible for anyone else to have a chance at liking the book. I wrote my paper on the first half of the novel and I haven't gone back to it since. Later that summer, I spoke on the phone with the girl who was to be my freshman year roommate and when I asked her what her favorite book was, she replied, "The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Have you read it?" One day I'll go back to it... just not any time soon. I have a similar feeling about Faulkner... I've only read As I Lay Dying and one day, I'll read A Light in August and see if he can redeem himself, but for now, I keep my distance.
The Guardian talks about the writers we hate (and how to interact with people who love the writers we hate).
The Guardian talks about the writers we hate (and how to interact with people who love the writers we hate).
Diary of a Prime Minister
From icUxbridge.co.uk:Prime Minister Tony Blair has revealed that he does not keep a diary - but wishes he had.Read the whole article here.
The news will raise questions over the memoirs Mr Blair is expected to write after he leaves 10 Downing Street later this year.
Publishers are believed to be queuing up to get their hands on what will be one of the biggest political books of the decade, potentially earning millions of pounds for Mr Blair.
But they now know that he will not have the benefit of a detailed record of his private thoughts, discussions and feelings to draw on when recreating the story of his 10 years in office.
The revelation came during a podcast interview with actor and comedian Stephen Fry recorded by Mr Blair for broadcast on the 10 Downing Street website www.pm.gov.uk.
2.08.2007
YouWriteOn Winners Named
From the BBC News:
Six new writers who published chapters of their books online are to make it into print as winners of YouWriteOn website's book of the year awards.Read the whole article here or visit YouWriteOn here.
The Arts Council website named Briton Guy Saville's historical thriller The Africa Reich its main prize winner.
Fellow British writer HJ Windsor won the children's book of the year award for Charlie Squires Goes Elsewhere.
Literature for the MySpace Generation
From the Guardian:
Journalists have an appalling track record when it comes to predicting revolution in the publishing industry, particularly when related to new technology. It was only at the turn of the millennium, for instance, that we were confidently forecasting that the rising "e-tide" would wash away the old publishing houses. Electronic books were going to make the traditional ink and paper product seem as ludicrously old-fashioned as Moses's stone tablets. Meanwhile, the free transfer of data on the internet was going to make publishers' distribution networks entirely redundant and loosen their grasp on copyright so completely that most of their revenue streams would dry up.Read the whole article here.
Dove's Beauty Campaign
The Atlanic online with an really interesting article about the beauty in everyone... or rather, perhaps the absence of beauty in some people. Particularly intriguing is the focus on Dove's latest marketing campaign about "real beauty." Make sure you watch the video, it's pretty interesting to see the creation of this particular face.
2.07.2007
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
(Ridiculously late review #1 given that I finished this right after New Year's...)I find it nearly impossible to classify Rebecca Solsnit's book as any one genre of literature. Memoir, travel, philosophy... she is one of those Renaissance women who writes contemporary philosophy that is too fine to be called "every day" and too accessible to be called "high brow." It's vaguely reminiscent of Alain de Botton in the essayist tone but she's more focused on memoir and personal experience than de Botton. She's also incredibly environmentally aware (unsurprising that she emphasizes nature and wilderness as people become more and more frightened of that which isn't totally tamed, under our control, and complete with a Starbucks).
A Field Guide to Getting Lost discusses many interpretations and experiences of the word "lost." Because she gives a rather personal account of losing things and being lost, it's hard for me to put into words a personal reaction to her work. Instead, I offer you this link to a Village Voice article about this book... and I probably illegally reproduce a selection from one of her chapters here:
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.Buy the book here. You know you want to.
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, the color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. "Longing," says the poet Robert Haas, "because desire is full of endless distances." Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world. One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast, and the brown coffee and yellow eggs and green traffic lights filled me with no such desire, and besides I was looking forward to going hiking on the mountain's west slope.
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Sometimes is always far away.
The mystic Simone Weil wrote to a friend on another continent, "Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated." For Weil, love is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance between herself and her friend. Even when that friend arrives on the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the unknowable, around that which cannot be possessed. The far seeps in even to the nearest. After all we hardly know our own depths.
Racist School Books?
From the Guardian:
A Saudi-run school in London uses textbooks which describe Jews as monkeys and Christians as pigs, according to papers filed with an employment tribunal by a former teacher.Read the whole story here.
Teaching materials used at the King Fahd school in Acton, west London, translated from Arabic for an unfair dismissal claim against the school, say Jews "engage in witchcraft and sorcery and obey Satan", and invite pupils to "name some repugnant characteristics of Jews" and to give examples of worthless religions, such as Judaism and Christianity.
Kiki of Montparnasse
Kiki of Montparnasse, a fascinating figure on the 1920s Paris scene. The lover of Man Ray and a friend of Hemingway, the Guardian talks about the darker life of a troubled soul as a new biography about her makes its way to the bookstore shelves.
Curriculum "Untouchables"
From the Telegraph:
Shakespeare's sonnets, the two World Wars and the Holocaust are "untouchables" that must be retained at all cost in the new secondary curriculum, Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, announced last night.Read the whole article here.
On the eve of the major review of what is taught to pupils aged 11-14 that starts today, he issued a list of compulsory topics.
Schools should be encouraged to offer "economically useful" world languages, such as Urdu and Mandarin instead of French and German.
Mr Johnson pledged to "protect the classic pillars of the curriculum children have studied for decades" and warned his advisers that the new flexibility for teachers to tailor lessons to their pupils must not result in the loss of key events and skills.
"There are certain untouchable elements of the secondary curriculum that all teenagers should learn for a classic, well-rounded, British education," he said.
These include classic pre-20th century literature such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Daniel Defoe and George Eliot, as well as algebra, geometry and equations in maths.
LibraryThing
You'll note that I talked about LibraryThing ages ago. Well, now the Guardian is talking about it, too. I feel so ahead of the curve...
2.06.2007
Your A-Z of Eth!cal PR
Here's a selection from a funny piece in the Telegraph: "Your A-Z of Eth!cal PR."
Dostoevsky, Fyodor: Russian novelist remarkable for his profound psychological insight.Read the whole thing here.
He may be a great writer, but sadly Fyodor Dostoevsky hasn't been shifting enough units to merit his place in the current Waterstone's 3-for-2 promotion. Yes, punters will happily pick up their Jilly Coopers and their Joanna Trollopes, and who can blame them, but at the last minute something stops them making that final stretch towards Crime and Punishment.
When Waterstone's came to us with this problem, my first thought was of rebranding. I was brutally frank. "The title's a definite downer," I said. "Today's busy shopper with a hectic lifestyle doesn't want to relax with a book called Crime and Punishment."
They heard what I was saying. Result? Come the spring, the book will be appearing on their shelves with more of a roses-and-bottle-of-bubbly rom-com feel to its jacket, the strapline, "Sonya would follow him anywhere – even to chilly Siberia", and the new title – so much more fun – Don't Tell the Inspector!
Hogarth and the Fun of Filth
There's a new Hogarth exhibit at the Tate and so here's the Guardian to talk about Hogarth's ruch and rude portrayal of life.
Language, Truth ... and Wine
From the New English Review:
An early reviewer of the writings of DH Lawrence remarked with some degree of accuracy and exasperation: “For Mr Lawrence, everything is always like something else”. In the belle epoque of Edwardian Britain, when a kind of debonair confidence made all knowledge unproblematic, it must have been puzzling for a stolid Times of London reviewer to have a chap come along insisting that things could only be understood by appreciating their likeness to other things.Read this whole article here, a discussion of writing about wine.
This probably explains why there was never much writing about wine in those days. Wine is always described as being like something else. This is appealingly post modern. If a chardonnay tastes a bit like a peach, what then does the peach taste like? A chardonnay? And if so, what does either taste like? If you must describe the Van Loveren 2001 limited edition Merlot as being “chocolately”, does it mean that chocolate tastes like the Van Loveren Merlot? And if we like the Merlot on account if its tasting like chocolate, why don’t we eat chocolate instead of drinking wine?
These are questions of a profound epistemological weight. They reflect the uncertain status of anything we claim to know and understand. If I don’t understand the meaning of a word, and I look it up in the dictionary, I see it explained in other words. Those other words, in case I don’t understand them either, are explained by yet further words. There is no absolute point of reference. So where does knowledge begin? Aren’t we all just refracting meaning around from one word to another in a pleasant verbal gavotte to fill in the time as we wait for death?
Such are the existential problems confronting the wine writer.
In Search of Flannery O'Connor
From the NY Times:
The sun was white above the trees, and sinking fast. I was a few miles past Milledgeville, Ga., somewhere outside of Toomsboro, on a two-lane highway that rose and plunged and twisted through red clay hills and pine woods. I had no fixed destination, just a plan to follow a back road to some weedy field in time to watch the sun go down on Flannery O'Connor's Georgia.Read the whole article "In Search of Flannery O'Connor" in the NY Times Travel section here.
Somewhere outside Toomsboro is where, in O'Connor's best-known short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a family has a car accident and a tiresome old grandmother has an epiphany. The fog of petty selfishness that has shrouded her life clears when she feels a sudden spasm of kindness for a stranger, a brooding prison escapee who calls himself the Misfit.
Of course, that's also the moment that he shoots her in the chest, but in O'Connor's world, where good and evil are as real as a spreading puddle of blood, it amounts to a happy ending. The grandmother is touched by grace at the last possible moment, and she dies smiling.
“She would of been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Sotheby's Sale Breaks European Record
From the Guardian:Art records were smashed once again last night as London's biggest sale week got under way, with £94.9m of works disappearing in a single, packed auction at Sotheby's.Read the whole article here.
The night's top price was £8.75m, paid for Chaim Soutine's 1921 L'Homme au Foulard Rouge, far surpassing its estimate of £3.5m to £5m. Just 10 years ago the same picture was bought for £1.5m.
The figure recorded was the highest ever for a sale of impressionist and modern art in Europe.
And as for that Soutine that sold for £8.75m, is it worth it? That's what the Guardian asks here.
Space Debris
I know that you can turn on the television and be frightened by man's influence on the earth (okay... you should be able to turn on the television and hear much more about man's influence on the Earth than you do because it's a ridiculously important issue, it's just apparently not as flashy as car chases and shootings), so perhaps you're not looking for another story, but here's one about our impact on space around Earth... and all the junk and debris that we've let loose into the atmosphere. Check out the images, they're pretty interesting.
It's on the List...
Have you ever pretended that you've read something that you haven't? If you say "no," you're lying. But perhaps you can get away with those claims and no one will ever know. Speaking as someone who frequently hears "You've read [insert title here], right?" and people rarely stop for my affirmation before discussing it (they're that sure that I've read it), I admit that I've done it a few times, too. Even Bookslut has done it... and she gives some tips on doing it for certain books, too.
Perhaps a book that we should all put on our lists of books to actually read is Pierre Bayard's Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus? (How Do You Talk About Books You Haven't Read?).
Of course, you have to read French in order to actually read this one. Need to bluff your way through this, too? Then read about it here in the Guardian or here in the Times.
(And now the NY Times eventually gets around to discussing this book, too.)
Perhaps a book that we should all put on our lists of books to actually read is Pierre Bayard's Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus? (How Do You Talk About Books You Haven't Read?).
Of course, you have to read French in order to actually read this one. Need to bluff your way through this, too? Then read about it here in the Guardian or here in the Times.
(And now the NY Times eventually gets around to discussing this book, too.)
Time for Reading
The Chronicle for Higher Education talks about making time for reading:
I want to start a new movement, now.Read the whole article here.
From the 19th century on, more and more segments of our society — farmers, factory workers, doctors, professors — have been urged to speed things up in order to produce more eggs or automobiles, or to heal or educate more people. Charles Dickens gave expression to the pathos of life under such a regime in his novel Hard Times; so did Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a work of cinematic art that gets to the heart of what ails society. The Monty Python crew made fun of this imperative in its "All-England Summarize Proust Competition" for the best synopsis of Proust's seven-volume Remembrance of Things Past in 15 seconds. The fun poked at attempts to speed-read the classics was as painful as Chaplin's effort to survive industrialization. And it's no joke: Imagine radiologists forced to read 13 mammograms per hour, without interrupting their reading to speak to the women whose scans they are analyzing. I know of at least one such case.
Is it any surprise that there is now a reading crisis worldwide that affects people at all levels, from preschool to graduate school, the affluent and the poor alike? Don't assume you are immune, people of higher education. Is it reassuring or frightening to learn that problems that afflict one group actually afflict other groups considered to be as different as night and day? Maybe such a realization is both consoling and discommoding in equal measure. In any case, the reading crisis that is upon us is widespread.
Seeing Red
As Valentine's Day approaches and the market is flooded with red objects, ready for purchase, the NY Times discusses the way we see red (though really, they forgot to include redheads in their discussion):As it happens, red is an exquisite ambassador for love, and in more ways than people may realize. Not only is red the color of the blood that flushes the face and swells the pelvis and that one swears one would spill to save the beloved’s prized hide. It is also a fine metaphoric mate for the complexity and contrariness of love. In red we see shades of life, death, fury, shame, courage, anguish, pride and the occasional overuse of exfoliants designed to combat signs of aging. Red is bright and bold and has a big lipsticked mouth, through which it happily speaks out of all sides at once. Yoo-hoo! yodels red, come close, have a look. Stop right there, red amends, one false move and you’re dead.Read the whole article here.
2.05.2007
Hillary's Humor
The LA Times on Hillary Clinton's humor and what it says about her:
Clinton said: "You guys keep telling me, 'Lighten up! Be funny!' I get a little funny and now I'm being psychoanalyzed."Read the whole article here.
The clip made the expected blogospheric rounds and wound up on "The Daily Show," but I think the only psychoanalysis this incident warrants is an examination of just why Clinton's search for a sense of humor has been tougher than locating a lost contact lens in the Dead Sea.
Jane Austen: Teen Idol
I suppose I shouldn't be irked at anything that allows more people to experience Jane Austen, but the latest crop of teen-oriented Austen works give me pause. Here's the Telegraph talking about "lit girl," Miss Jane Austen.
The Cartagena Hay Festival
From the Guardian:
When a British literary festival and a fabled South American republic set out to change their image, the results are not so much bizarre as surreal.Read the rest of the article here.
Colombia, so long associated with Pablo Escobar and narco-terrorism, is redefining itself as the country of tourism and creativity, not guerrilla violence. Where New Zealand is 'pure' and India 'incredible', Colombia's new logo declares 'Colombia es pasión'.
Colombia's quest for a fresh international narrative has coincided with the Hay Festival's ambitions to take off from Wales and bring contemporary literature to the wider world. The second Cartagena Hay Festival, trading wellies for bikinis, dominated Colombia's cultural headlines last week.
Potter E-Book Nixed
It had been suggested that an e-book version of number seven, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, would be released this time around, but those rumors have been put to rest as JK Rowling's literary agency denied that any such plans for an e-book of any Harry Potter book were being made. The risk of piracy was cited as a major concern.
Cutting Classics
Gasp! Seriously? The Guardian blogs discuss cutting the classics:
The news that Weidenfeld & Nicolson are producing slimline versions of classics has most people apoplectic but actually I don't feel as appalled as everyone else seems to be.Read more here.
In Praise of a Guilty Genius
The fuss over the lack of fuss over Auden's centenary is actually quite intriguing... it means people seem to be discussing Auden more than just sticking his picture up and showing a clip from Four Weddings and a Funeral. I really quite enjoy Auden but I also prefer celebrations to be a bit more low-key.
The Origins of Repressed Memory
This is one of the more fascinating articles/ideas I've come across in the past few weeks...
In any case, I thought this was ridiculously interesting. Check out the NY Times article here or go to this website to read about the reward that these researchers are offering to people who can come up with examples in fiction or non-fiction before 1800.
The beautiful and deeply religious Madame de Tourvel is so distraught after cheating on her husband in the 1782 novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” that she blacks out the betrayal altogether, arriving at a convent with no idea of what had brought her there. Soon the horror of the infidelity rushes back, in all its incriminating force.I mean come on, how amazing is that? Before 1800, there was no such thing as repressed memories? Or rather, that we can't find any real evidence for it (beyond a few instances in myth of people forgetting things momentarily)? It's remarkable that this is a semi-recent phenomenon (of course, then some people say it's actually impossible for the brain to block painful memories without willful instigation by the person in question).
More than two centuries later, she has become part of a longstanding debate about whether the brain can block access to painful memories, like betrayals and childhood sexual abuse, and suddenly release them later on.
In a paper posted online in the current issue of the journal Psychological Medicine, a team of psychiatrists and literary scholars reports that it could not find a single account of repressed memory, fictional or not, before the year 1800.
In any case, I thought this was ridiculously interesting. Check out the NY Times article here or go to this website to read about the reward that these researchers are offering to people who can come up with examples in fiction or non-fiction before 1800.
The Supermodel School of Poetry
The NY Sun discusses Carla Bruni's latest CD:There is something to be said for the silence of the page. On it, a poem — three neat quatrains, say — can speak, indestructibly, to the eye, ear, and mind.Read the entire article here.
But there is also something to be said for singing along. Recently I found myself doing just that to a poem by, of all people, Emily Dickinson, as performed by, of all people, Carla Bruni, the Italian ex-supermodel and ex-girlfriend of Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, and Donald Trump. Dickinson's poem, "I Went to Heaven," is featured on Ms. Bruni's new album, "No Promises." On it, she sets to music poems by W.B. Yeats, Dorothy Parker, Walter de la Mare, W.H. Auden, and Christina Rossetti, among others.
The Drip Wars
From the NY Times:
THE disciplines of art history and connoisseurship tend to conjure up images of hushed galleries, towering library stacks and an almost priestly corps of experts equipped not only with the knowledge of centuries but also with “the eye,” a sixth sense of whether a canvas is a Rembrandt or just an attractive also-ran.More on science's increasing role in art and the latest information on the debate as to whether or not that Matter painting is, in fact, a Pollock.
But increasingly, other things might be included in this tableau — electron microscopes, infrared spectroscopes, radiocarbon dating, X-ray fluorescence technology first developed for the Mars Pathfinder and teams of white-coated people with mechanical engineering or physics doctorates poring over artwork.
2.02.2007
Gambian President Claims He Can Cure AIDS
From the BBC:
A claim by Gambian President Yahya Jammeh that he can cure AIDS in three days has been lambasted by a leading South African HIV/AIDS specialist.Astonished? Try appalled. Read more from the BBC on this here.
"I'm astonished. The danger of a president standing up [to say this] is shocking," Jerry Coovadia told the BBC.
Mr Jammeh said last month he had begun treating 10 patients on Thursdays with secret medicinal herb ingredients.
His health minister backs his claims, saying in trials so far patients had gained weight and physically improved.
World Book Day Approaches
World Book Day has, for the past ten years, been declared as March 1st. For this anniversary, the Guardian asks you to think about your top ten books that you just couldn't live without.
Kidnapped in Edinburgh
It's February and (if you remember) that means that Edinburgh is trying to get everyone to read Kidnapped.
Seriously, Biden, get it together.
I mean, come on. You're a Senator. You should know better than refer to an upstanding African American as a fairy tale come true as you're throwing your hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination.
Billionaire Duped by Novelist?
From the LA Times:
Attorneys for Philip Anschutz allege that author Clive Cussler duped the Denver industrialist into paying $10 million for film rights to the adventure novel "Sahara" by flagrantly inflating his book sales to more than 100 million copies.Read the whole article here.
Gulbenkian Prize Nominees
From the Guardian:
Weston Park in Sheffield, the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, and the De La Warr pavilion at Bexhill, an art deco gem voted one of the nation's favourite modernist buildings, are among the 10 national museum projects nominated yesterday for the £100,000 Gulbenkian Prize, richest cash prize in the arts.Read the whole article here.
Potter Stripped Bare
Daniel Radcliffe, the actor best known as Harry Potter for four films and counting, can be seen in London's West End revival of Equus... and when we say he can be seen in this play, we mean you can see all of him. The NY Times discusses the bit of controversy surrounding the promotional photos that show quite a bit of him, too.
2.01.2007
From Virgil to Alma Mater
From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article on how colleges become alma maters.
Wiki-Novel
Penguin is planning a "wiki-novel" where multiple writers (aka anyone who wishes to join in) will collaborate on one project that anyone can edit, cut, and re-write.
Richest Art Sale Europe Has Ever Seen?
Read the article in the Guardian about what could be the richest art sale in European history.
Weisz Signs On to Sin City 2...
Sigh...
I hated Sin City. I really did. It was aesthetically interesting but I really just didn't enjoy myself at all... and now my beloved Rachel Weisz has signed on to star in Sin City 2... it's not even the original movie, baby, how can you sign on to do a sequel? Oh, and she apparently ousted Angelina Jolie from the role, too.
Thanks for sending me the article, Jadis!
I hated Sin City. I really did. It was aesthetically interesting but I really just didn't enjoy myself at all... and now my beloved Rachel Weisz has signed on to star in Sin City 2... it's not even the original movie, baby, how can you sign on to do a sequel? Oh, and she apparently ousted Angelina Jolie from the role, too.
Thanks for sending me the article, Jadis!
Farewell, Ms. Ivins
Molly Ivins, political satirist and columnist who never shied away from the term "liberal," has died at the age of 62 from breast cancer. Read about her life and work in the NY Times or the Guardian.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)