Fiction nurtures the soul - a must for even hard-hearted politicians
Chris Bowen
March 11, 2009
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A prominent federal politician recently boasted he hadn't read a fiction book since he left school.
Now, while my personal tastes will lead me to the non-fiction shelf more often than novels, it was a bit disconcerting to hear a prominent public figure speak so derisively of fiction.
This revelation from a parliamentary colleague got me thinking. Where would we be if we all lost the lessons of some of the great works of fiction? Where would we be if young people listened to this politician and stopped reading anything but textbooks? Is it a good thing that a leading politician would boast about cutting himself off from the world of novels? Why should we encourage young people to keep reading novels when there are so many other forms of modern entertainment?
People read for all sorts of reasons. Some novels are just rollicking good stories and others hold deeper lessons. A novel can be an enjoyable read and also expand the mind.
Fiction gives us an understanding of the motivations of people that is unmatched by any other art form. And that, of course is the beauty of fiction: it exposes every situation imaginable. Fiction provides a window into the human heart and human mind.
We all live one life, but readers can live thousands of lives. Novels can open the mind. Researchers have argued that people who read novels and who have to think about the connection between a character's thoughts and their actions are better at social interaction. Children who read novels are developing their imagination, and therefore their ability to "think outside the square" and solve problems.
Lisa Zunshine of the University of Kentucky has described reading a good detective novel as weightlifting for the mind. A work does not need to be non-fiction to be serious, to help us be better people, to give insights that textbooks and non-fiction works would struggle to give us.
As we experience difficult economic times, it pays to read Keynes, Stiglitz and Krugman of course. But it also pays to read Steinbeck. Set in the Great Depression, his The Grapes of Wrath is a soaring testament to the virtues of common people. As he follows the struggles of the Joad family, cast out of their farm through no fault of their own, every page is a reminder of the burdens of those who are thrown on an economic scrap heap through no fault of their own, and the case for helping them through. It is also a homily of hope about human kindness, about the best and worst of the human condition. It's a timeless book, yet a book of particular resonance as we enter tough times again. Continued...
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Tuesday, 10 March 2009
Rebecca puts Birmingham on the map.....
Birmingham schoogirl's short story selected for national publication
Mar 10 2009 by Tony Collins, Birmingham Mail
SCHOOLGIRL Rebecca Hardy is used to telling stories.
And now, the 13-year-old from Bartley Green has made it into print after having one of her tales published in a book to be circulated across the country.
Rebecca, who attends Hillcrest School in Stonehouse Lane, Bartley Green, saw her short story beat off more than 2,700 entries from over 500 schools.
And her entry, called Memories of my Past, has been published in an anthology of short stories entitled The Cry of the Wolf.
Rebecca is one of only 22 talented young writers to be published in two collections of the best secondary school entries to the 2009 Evans Schools Short Story competition.
They were published to help mark World Book Day on Thursday 5 March.
The young story writers were asked to create their own short tales using a series of first lines supplied by leading children’s authors as the starting point.
Rebecca used a first line provided by Jenny Valentine – “When I woke up it was still dark and I knew straight away everything was different” – to craft an evocative account of childhood memories.
She said: “It’s about a girl’s life and she sees herself growing up and how she first learnt to walk. It was fun because I had imagined it myself.
“I have always been interested in writing and have been involved in a lot of story competitions, even at primary school. But I was quite shocked when I found out my story had been chosen,” she added.
Rebecca will be presented with her copy of The Cry of the Wolf during an assembly at Hillcrest School on March 10. A further 100 copies of the book will be given to her school by publishers Evans, free of charge.
The Cry of the Wolf is on sale in bookshops for £3.99, with all profits to be donated to World Book Day.
Mar 10 2009 by Tony Collins, Birmingham Mail
SCHOOLGIRL Rebecca Hardy is used to telling stories.
And now, the 13-year-old from Bartley Green has made it into print after having one of her tales published in a book to be circulated across the country.
Rebecca, who attends Hillcrest School in Stonehouse Lane, Bartley Green, saw her short story beat off more than 2,700 entries from over 500 schools.
And her entry, called Memories of my Past, has been published in an anthology of short stories entitled The Cry of the Wolf.
Rebecca is one of only 22 talented young writers to be published in two collections of the best secondary school entries to the 2009 Evans Schools Short Story competition.
They were published to help mark World Book Day on Thursday 5 March.
The young story writers were asked to create their own short tales using a series of first lines supplied by leading children’s authors as the starting point.
Rebecca used a first line provided by Jenny Valentine – “When I woke up it was still dark and I knew straight away everything was different” – to craft an evocative account of childhood memories.
She said: “It’s about a girl’s life and she sees herself growing up and how she first learnt to walk. It was fun because I had imagined it myself.
“I have always been interested in writing and have been involved in a lot of story competitions, even at primary school. But I was quite shocked when I found out my story had been chosen,” she added.
Rebecca will be presented with her copy of The Cry of the Wolf during an assembly at Hillcrest School on March 10. A further 100 copies of the book will be given to her school by publishers Evans, free of charge.
The Cry of the Wolf is on sale in bookshops for £3.99, with all profits to be donated to World Book Day.
Tuesday, 10 February 2009
Sunday, 1 February 2009
John Updike ~ A man for all seasons.....
John Updike: There was style, and more
By Carlin Romano
Inquirer Book Critic
Can a great literary figure write too beautifully?
Consider two related questions. Can a superb concert pianist hit the notes too accurately? Can a supreme realist painter capture a scene too exactly, too photographically?
To the layperson, the answer to all three questions would seem to be no. Even many professional musicians and painters would chime in with the public on the last two matters.
The death this week of John Updike, however, reminds us that things play out differently in literature. Too much beautiful writing, at times combined with too little plot, often brings opprobrium upon its creator. Recall that sainted immortal, Marcel Proust, renowned and loved worldwide for the music of his sentences, the lingering perfume of his style.
"I may perhaps be dead from the neck up," French editor Marc Humblot wrote in his 1912 rejection letter to Proust, turning down the first part of what would become Remembrance of Things Past, "but rack my brains as I may, I can't see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep."
In the appreciations and obituaries of Updike over the last few days, one hears a similar plaint asserted, repeated, cited, acknowledged or gainsaid.
To be sure, sheer celebration of his uncannily adroit prose erupted as soon as the bad news got out. Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe exulted that "few writers have staged such elegant lexical ballets on the page."
Fellow Pulitzer-anointed critic Henry Allen, in the Washington Post, confessed that despite his own aim to become the greatest living American prose stylist, he learned, when reading Rabbit, Run at age 19, that Updike could not be bested, that the older man was "a dragon who would be unslayable."
"Instead," Allen continued, "he stalked me for 35 years, breathing the cool, ego-crushing fire of a style that didn't just evoke reality but also seemed to violate one of our most ancient taboos, the one against the making of graven images - a style that created eerie holograms with 100 percent correspondence to the material world."
Yet those two voices could not drown out that long-established grumble: Yes, an astonishingly gorgeous writer, that Updike, but to what point?
As noted by the Los Angeles Times in its obituary, the distinguished critic and scholar Harold Bloom complained years ago that while Updike could craft a "beautifully economical narrative," he lacked depth, leaving him "a minor novelist with a major style."
Such caveats abounded early in Updike's career. Eliot Fremont-Smith, in a 1981 Village Voice essay, commented on the "great divide between Updike's exquisite command of prose and . . . the apparent no-good vulgar nothing he expended it on." Critic Norman Podhoretz, in Commentary, deemed Updike's style "overly lyrical, bloated like a child who has eaten too much candy." Gore Vidal attacked his beetle-browed contemporary for being "fixed in facility." Alfred Kazin, one of the era's major critics, caviled that Updike "can brilliantly describe the adult world without conveying its depth and risks," a remark that stung Updike sufficiently for him to note it in his memoir.
Who could be surprised, then, that such reservations arose again, and needed to be reported, in the farewells of the week?
Cultural critic Todd Gitlin, posting about Updike on the blog Talking Points Memo, declared, "It felt to me then , and still does, that Updike's fine instruments did not enable him to take the measure of enormity the way Faulkner, and Ellison, and Bellow, and Mailer, and Roth at their best could do, and in that way he remained an outsider to the huge awful stories."
The rebuke arises partly because, in modern culture, we expect writers and film directors to take the spot philosophers and theologians occupied centuries ago. Too intellectually lazy to access our actual philosophers and theologians, we dictate that our writers be overt moralists, political theorists, social critics, even journalists. If they can write pretty, too, that's fine, but pretty without substance? No thanks.
The mistake about Updike from the beginning was to imagine that there's an "either-or" in literature as inevitable as the one delineated in morals by Updike's much-admired Kierkegaard.
Because Updike chose to imply his beliefs through stories, descriptions and nuances rather than isms, suspicious fellow intellectuals ruled that no thinker operated behind the curtain. Because he evoked writerly envy more than any of his contemporaries except Saul Bellow - sentence-by-sentence combat between the two would have amounted to a Super Bowl of fiction - many peers resorted to slicing him where they could.
And yet, as younger novelist Jeffrey Eugenides marvelously observed on the New Yorker's Updike memorial page this week, "When a writer dies, a vote comes in." Judging by the burgeoning citations on artsandlettersdaily.com, full of tributes from writers and critics around the world, it's a landslide for "John Updike, Master," not "John Updike, Master Stylist."
Truth be told, Updike shared the view that beauty in life or literature could never be only sentence-deep, some valuable extracted from virtuoso mosaic work in words or rococo flourishes across pages.
Referring once to what his Pennsylvania boyhood bestowed on him, he wrote, "A kind of respect for middle class, ordinary life, a belief that there was something worth saying about it, that there was struggle and morals to be gained, that there was beauty in it."
Similarly, reflecting elsewhere on his career, Updike explained that "Three Great Sacred Things" had ruled his life and work: religion, sex and art.
He didn't mention style.
He was right not to.
By Carlin Romano
Inquirer Book Critic
Can a great literary figure write too beautifully?
Consider two related questions. Can a superb concert pianist hit the notes too accurately? Can a supreme realist painter capture a scene too exactly, too photographically?
To the layperson, the answer to all three questions would seem to be no. Even many professional musicians and painters would chime in with the public on the last two matters.
The death this week of John Updike, however, reminds us that things play out differently in literature. Too much beautiful writing, at times combined with too little plot, often brings opprobrium upon its creator. Recall that sainted immortal, Marcel Proust, renowned and loved worldwide for the music of his sentences, the lingering perfume of his style.
"I may perhaps be dead from the neck up," French editor Marc Humblot wrote in his 1912 rejection letter to Proust, turning down the first part of what would become Remembrance of Things Past, "but rack my brains as I may, I can't see why a chap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep."
In the appreciations and obituaries of Updike over the last few days, one hears a similar plaint asserted, repeated, cited, acknowledged or gainsaid.
To be sure, sheer celebration of his uncannily adroit prose erupted as soon as the bad news got out. Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe exulted that "few writers have staged such elegant lexical ballets on the page."
Fellow Pulitzer-anointed critic Henry Allen, in the Washington Post, confessed that despite his own aim to become the greatest living American prose stylist, he learned, when reading Rabbit, Run at age 19, that Updike could not be bested, that the older man was "a dragon who would be unslayable."
"Instead," Allen continued, "he stalked me for 35 years, breathing the cool, ego-crushing fire of a style that didn't just evoke reality but also seemed to violate one of our most ancient taboos, the one against the making of graven images - a style that created eerie holograms with 100 percent correspondence to the material world."
Yet those two voices could not drown out that long-established grumble: Yes, an astonishingly gorgeous writer, that Updike, but to what point?
As noted by the Los Angeles Times in its obituary, the distinguished critic and scholar Harold Bloom complained years ago that while Updike could craft a "beautifully economical narrative," he lacked depth, leaving him "a minor novelist with a major style."
Such caveats abounded early in Updike's career. Eliot Fremont-Smith, in a 1981 Village Voice essay, commented on the "great divide between Updike's exquisite command of prose and . . . the apparent no-good vulgar nothing he expended it on." Critic Norman Podhoretz, in Commentary, deemed Updike's style "overly lyrical, bloated like a child who has eaten too much candy." Gore Vidal attacked his beetle-browed contemporary for being "fixed in facility." Alfred Kazin, one of the era's major critics, caviled that Updike "can brilliantly describe the adult world without conveying its depth and risks," a remark that stung Updike sufficiently for him to note it in his memoir.
Who could be surprised, then, that such reservations arose again, and needed to be reported, in the farewells of the week?
Cultural critic Todd Gitlin, posting about Updike on the blog Talking Points Memo, declared, "It felt to me then , and still does, that Updike's fine instruments did not enable him to take the measure of enormity the way Faulkner, and Ellison, and Bellow, and Mailer, and Roth at their best could do, and in that way he remained an outsider to the huge awful stories."
The rebuke arises partly because, in modern culture, we expect writers and film directors to take the spot philosophers and theologians occupied centuries ago. Too intellectually lazy to access our actual philosophers and theologians, we dictate that our writers be overt moralists, political theorists, social critics, even journalists. If they can write pretty, too, that's fine, but pretty without substance? No thanks.
The mistake about Updike from the beginning was to imagine that there's an "either-or" in literature as inevitable as the one delineated in morals by Updike's much-admired Kierkegaard.
Because Updike chose to imply his beliefs through stories, descriptions and nuances rather than isms, suspicious fellow intellectuals ruled that no thinker operated behind the curtain. Because he evoked writerly envy more than any of his contemporaries except Saul Bellow - sentence-by-sentence combat between the two would have amounted to a Super Bowl of fiction - many peers resorted to slicing him where they could.
And yet, as younger novelist Jeffrey Eugenides marvelously observed on the New Yorker's Updike memorial page this week, "When a writer dies, a vote comes in." Judging by the burgeoning citations on artsandlettersdaily.com, full of tributes from writers and critics around the world, it's a landslide for "John Updike, Master," not "John Updike, Master Stylist."
Truth be told, Updike shared the view that beauty in life or literature could never be only sentence-deep, some valuable extracted from virtuoso mosaic work in words or rococo flourishes across pages.
Referring once to what his Pennsylvania boyhood bestowed on him, he wrote, "A kind of respect for middle class, ordinary life, a belief that there was something worth saying about it, that there was struggle and morals to be gained, that there was beauty in it."
Similarly, reflecting elsewhere on his career, Updike explained that "Three Great Sacred Things" had ruled his life and work: religion, sex and art.
He didn't mention style.
He was right not to.
David Cameron captured by Aliens!
UK Conservative Party Leader David Cameron: I Will Share Info About UFOs
By Robert Paul Reyes
"David Cameron vowed today that if he was elected Prime Minister he would bring an end to the era of government secrecy over UFOs and extra-terrestrial activity.
Speaking at one of his 'Cameron Direct' public meetings, the Conservative Party leader pledged that a Tory government would be 'entirely open and frank' in sharing any information about alien life-forms.
At the meeting in Tynemouth, North-East England, he was questioned about a string of recent mysterious incidents.'I have no idea if there is intelligent life out there,' he replied.'I do believe in freedom of information and openness and this question has been asked from time to time, and I think we should be as open and clear as possible.'
"http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5600271.ece
Cameron promises to be "open and frank" in sharing any information about alien life-forms. I wish Cameron were open and frank now, and admit that the UFO issue is an effort to distract the British citizens from the serious economic woes facing them.
It's disappointing that a politician who may elected Prime Minister of England is obsessed with finding intelligent life out there when it's in such short supply down here.
There is no government secrecy over UFOs in the UK or in the United States, and any political candidate who makes such a false claim is unfit to serve in government.
With the intractable economic problems facing the international community, no world leader should waste his time worrying about UFOs.
UFO mania has gripped the UK, almost every day there's a story about a UFO sighting in the tabloids. A true leader wouldn't feed the UFO frenzy, he would dismiss is as so much nonsense.
Robert Paul Reyes is a NewsBlaze writer on Politics, Pop Culture and Pointless Pontificating. Contact him by writing to NewsBlaze.Astrophysicist: On the pains of investigating the paranormal scientifically
More UFO Stories:
By Robert Paul Reyes
"David Cameron vowed today that if he was elected Prime Minister he would bring an end to the era of government secrecy over UFOs and extra-terrestrial activity.
Speaking at one of his 'Cameron Direct' public meetings, the Conservative Party leader pledged that a Tory government would be 'entirely open and frank' in sharing any information about alien life-forms.
At the meeting in Tynemouth, North-East England, he was questioned about a string of recent mysterious incidents.'I have no idea if there is intelligent life out there,' he replied.'I do believe in freedom of information and openness and this question has been asked from time to time, and I think we should be as open and clear as possible.'
"http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5600271.ece
Cameron promises to be "open and frank" in sharing any information about alien life-forms. I wish Cameron were open and frank now, and admit that the UFO issue is an effort to distract the British citizens from the serious economic woes facing them.
It's disappointing that a politician who may elected Prime Minister of England is obsessed with finding intelligent life out there when it's in such short supply down here.
There is no government secrecy over UFOs in the UK or in the United States, and any political candidate who makes such a false claim is unfit to serve in government.
With the intractable economic problems facing the international community, no world leader should waste his time worrying about UFOs.
UFO mania has gripped the UK, almost every day there's a story about a UFO sighting in the tabloids. A true leader wouldn't feed the UFO frenzy, he would dismiss is as so much nonsense.
Robert Paul Reyes is a NewsBlaze writer on Politics, Pop Culture and Pointless Pontificating. Contact him by writing to NewsBlaze.Astrophysicist: On the pains of investigating the paranormal scientifically
More UFO Stories:
Monday, 19 January 2009
Gordon Brown & Nixon!
January 19, 2009
What Gordon Brown and Richard Nixon have in common
Just after the Premiere of Frost/Nixon I reflected on the similarity between Tony Blair and David Frost that must have made it easier for Michael Sheen to play both characters.
Now the author of the play, Peter Morgan (who also wrote The Deal about the so-called Granita Pact), has noted the shared easy charm of these two characters.
Fascinatingly he made this comparison as part of a discussion of the shared characteristics of Richard Nixon and Gordon Brown (another likeness I have remarked upon):
They are people who are hard to like, people who have complicated emotional inner landscapes, and somehow have had trouble accessing them.
"People will hate me for saying this, but there are emotional similarities between Gordon Brown and Richard Nixon. Gordon Brown finds it hard to be liked and yet he's a brilliant man. But people don't warm to him, they don't like him.
Posted by Daniel Finkelstein on January 19, 2009 at 01:40 PM in Gordon Brown Permalink
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Its funny but I was beginning to think there is a physical resemblance now too. Brown's jowls and that fake smile are increasingly Nixonesque.
Posted by: Simon 19 Jan 2009 13:55:30
The similarity, for me, is that Dr James Gordon Brown, like the late Richard M. Nixon, is a bare-faced liar.
Posted by: Keith Darby 19 Jan 2009 14:06:56
What Gordon Brown and Richard Nixon have in common
Just after the Premiere of Frost/Nixon I reflected on the similarity between Tony Blair and David Frost that must have made it easier for Michael Sheen to play both characters.
Now the author of the play, Peter Morgan (who also wrote The Deal about the so-called Granita Pact), has noted the shared easy charm of these two characters.
Fascinatingly he made this comparison as part of a discussion of the shared characteristics of Richard Nixon and Gordon Brown (another likeness I have remarked upon):
They are people who are hard to like, people who have complicated emotional inner landscapes, and somehow have had trouble accessing them.
"People will hate me for saying this, but there are emotional similarities between Gordon Brown and Richard Nixon. Gordon Brown finds it hard to be liked and yet he's a brilliant man. But people don't warm to him, they don't like him.
Posted by Daniel Finkelstein on January 19, 2009 at 01:40 PM in Gordon Brown Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/297284/38563158
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference What Gordon Brown and Richard Nixon have in common:
Comments
Its funny but I was beginning to think there is a physical resemblance now too. Brown's jowls and that fake smile are increasingly Nixonesque.
Posted by: Simon 19 Jan 2009 13:55:30
The similarity, for me, is that Dr James Gordon Brown, like the late Richard M. Nixon, is a bare-faced liar.
Posted by: Keith Darby 19 Jan 2009 14:06:56
Sunday, 23 November 2008
The international takeover of French literature
The Afghan-born Prix Goncourt winner Atiq Rahimi. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty
The motives that guide the gaze of the literary world can be bothunthinkingly loyal and randomly fickle. For while there are moresacred cows grazing on the lush pastures of literature's vastcanonical steppe than there are dead ones hanging in Smithfieldmarket, it doesn't take long for last year's big thing to fall off theshelves into the ignominy of remainderdom, replaced by a glut of morebrightly coloured, aggressively marketed, bright young things.
This can happen to whole countries as well as individual authors. TakeFrance, for example. Before the award of this year's Nobel prize forliterature to the Franco-Mauritian JMB Le Clézio, the names of veryfew French authors were spoken outside specifically francophoneconfines, Michel Houellebecq and, to a much lesser extent, AmélieNothomb aside. A glance down the list of Nobel literature laureatesshows that since Sartre was offered, and refused, the prize in 1964,only Claude Simon (1984) and now Le Clézio have been French. Yet thefirst half of the century is crammed with French names, includingBergson, Gide, Sartre and Camus and even the very first prize, whichwent to the French poet and essayist Sully Prudhomme.
It is interesting then, with the Nobel prize returning the world'sgaze to homegrown French literature once more, that the gaze of theFrench literary establishment seems in turn to have cast itself muchmore widely than is usual. This is surprising, because the attitude ofour neighbours to their books is probably even more protectionist thantheir attitudes to their car manufacturing and agricultural industries. But to reflect on the recent spate of awards, bundled together as usual in November, is to behold a country opening up its literary lens as rarely before.
The biggest of the prizes, the Goncourt, went to Afghan-born AtiqRahimi for his novel Syngué Sabour (Stone of Patience). Beautiful,painful, and groundbreaking in its way, the novel is nonetheless only accidentally French. Beside him on the shortlist were Michel Le Bris's fast-paced romp between New York and Africa in the roaring 20s and Jean-Marie Blas de Robles's Brazillian-set Là où les tigres sont chez eux, which also carried off a Prix Médicis.
This international turn in the Goncourt is mirrored in the award ofthe haughty Académie Française's Grand Prix du roman to the formerFrench ambassador to Sweden, Marc Bressant, for his La DernièreConférence. Set in London, the novel is a semi-fictional reconstruction ofthe 1989 conference which turned Glasnost up to full heat andorchestrated the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It is also notably un-French in style, basking in the kind of straight-talking, faction-packed tradition of reportage most highly prized by British and American readers. Elsewhere, the Prix Renaudot, which last year went to the staple of French letters Daniel Pennac, was won by the Guinean author Tierno Monénembo for Le Roi de Kahel. Today's announcement of the Prix Interralié, won in 2007 by Christophe Ono-dit-Biot for his tale of the drug and antiques trafficking in Rangoon, Birmane, may well follow the trend.
It would be a shame if France were to turn its back on its homegrown tradition of high-art literature, for it has held onto it better and for longer than most European countries. But the internationalist turn in French literature is not about dumbing down. To judge from history, the last great phase in which French writers fixed their focus so far from their borders - the long build-up to Revolution - also marked the moment when the world's eyes were most firmly fixed on French literature, science and philosophy. So if some literary purists might be worrying about the dissipation of French tradition, the politicians, at least, should be rubbing their hands at the waxing of their cultural star.
Posted by Guy Dammann Wednesday November 19 2008 12.19 GMT
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//
The Afghan-born Prix Goncourt winner Atiq Rahimi. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty
The motives that guide the gaze of the literary world can be bothunthinkingly loyal and randomly fickle. For while there are moresacred cows grazing on the lush pastures of literature's vastcanonical steppe than there are dead ones hanging in Smithfieldmarket, it doesn't take long for last year's big thing to fall off theshelves into the ignominy of remainderdom, replaced by a glut of morebrightly coloured, aggressively marketed, bright young things.
This can happen to whole countries as well as individual authors. TakeFrance, for example. Before the award of this year's Nobel prize forliterature to the Franco-Mauritian JMB Le Clézio, the names of veryfew French authors were spoken outside specifically francophoneconfines, Michel Houellebecq and, to a much lesser extent, AmélieNothomb aside. A glance down the list of Nobel literature laureatesshows that since Sartre was offered, and refused, the prize in 1964,only Claude Simon (1984) and now Le Clézio have been French. Yet thefirst half of the century is crammed with French names, includingBergson, Gide, Sartre and Camus and even the very first prize, whichwent to the French poet and essayist Sully Prudhomme.
It is interesting then, with the Nobel prize returning the world'sgaze to homegrown French literature once more, that the gaze of theFrench literary establishment seems in turn to have cast itself muchmore widely than is usual. This is surprising, because the attitude ofour neighbours to their books is probably even more protectionist thantheir attitudes to their car manufacturing and agricultural industries. But to reflect on the recent spate of awards, bundled together as usual in November, is to behold a country opening up its literary lens as rarely before.
The biggest of the prizes, the Goncourt, went to Afghan-born AtiqRahimi for his novel Syngué Sabour (Stone of Patience). Beautiful,painful, and groundbreaking in its way, the novel is nonetheless only accidentally French. Beside him on the shortlist were Michel Le Bris's fast-paced romp between New York and Africa in the roaring 20s and Jean-Marie Blas de Robles's Brazillian-set Là où les tigres sont chez eux, which also carried off a Prix Médicis.
This international turn in the Goncourt is mirrored in the award ofthe haughty Académie Française's Grand Prix du roman to the formerFrench ambassador to Sweden, Marc Bressant, for his La DernièreConférence. Set in London, the novel is a semi-fictional reconstruction ofthe 1989 conference which turned Glasnost up to full heat andorchestrated the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It is also notably un-French in style, basking in the kind of straight-talking, faction-packed tradition of reportage most highly prized by British and American readers. Elsewhere, the Prix Renaudot, which last year went to the staple of French letters Daniel Pennac, was won by the Guinean author Tierno Monénembo for Le Roi de Kahel. Today's announcement of the Prix Interralié, won in 2007 by Christophe Ono-dit-Biot for his tale of the drug and antiques trafficking in Rangoon, Birmane, may well follow the trend.
It would be a shame if France were to turn its back on its homegrown tradition of high-art literature, for it has held onto it better and for longer than most European countries. But the internationalist turn in French literature is not about dumbing down. To judge from history, the last great phase in which French writers fixed their focus so far from their borders - the long build-up to Revolution - also marked the moment when the world's eyes were most firmly fixed on French literature, science and philosophy. So if some literary purists might be worrying about the dissipation of French tradition, the politicians, at least, should be rubbing their hands at the waxing of their cultural star.
Posted by Guy Dammann Wednesday November 19 2008 12.19 GMT
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Send to a friend
Share
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Monday, 6 October 2008
Saturday, 9 August 2008
Monday, 4 August 2008
Beijing ~ Where it Sizzles!!
Beijing where it sizzles
By Constantino TejeroPhilippine Daily InquirerFirst Posted 04:13pm (Mla time) 08/04/2008
ONE IMPRESSION OF Beijing is that it’s forbidding. Its structures are gray hulking monoliths, particularly the government buildings. And its people look grim-faced and more robust than those in Taipei and Shanghai, for instance.
In China’s 5,000 years of history, since this city was made its capital some 850 years ago, one of the visions that stay longest in the foreigner’s mind is of bloodshed: the Boxer Rebellion, which laid siege to foreign legations and had to be put down by an international expeditionary force.
And then, all of a sudden, the world comes here to play. And the battle cry is “One World, One Dream”—the slogan of the 29th Olympic Games, which opens in Beijing at 8 p.m. on Aug. 8 (note the triple eight, considered a propitious number).
One might say it’s an empty slogan. We’re rather more charmed by the adages ubiquitous all over the city, such as this one writ large across an old building in a busy intersection: “History creates today, tradition creates civilization.”
Natural poetry
Such solemn maxims are taken matter-of-factly in this land of sages, along with the natural poetry of its people. As in the names of these establishments in the financial district: Everbright Bank; Dazzle Jewelry Shop.
Or these two salons near embassy row: New Feeling Styling Hair; Silk Flow Hairdressers. And this joint in the bar row: Pure Girl Bar. The poetry can be found even in the supermarket: Carefree Coffee; Golden Swallow Snack Foods.
Naturally it creeps up to the suburbs and countryside: Hundred-Fruit Orchard; Jujube Picking Garden; Sweet Hill Farmhouse. And this is not to mention those innumerable cultural and historical landmarks like the Red Sandalwood Museum and White Cloud Temple.
Peculiarly Chinese, yes, and frequently making one’s toes curl. But wait till you’ve seen how these people can turn a delicious pun, as in this ramshackle shop: Comfoot Shoes.
Shopping and dining
These are the signs of the times the visitor is likely to encounter all over the city this week, along with the emblem called Dancing Beijing, an abstracted image combining a seal, a Chinese character and the Olympic rings; and the cutesy mascots Beibei (the fish), Jingjing (the panda), Huanhuan (the Olympic flame), Nini (the swallow) and Yingying (the Tibetan antelope. See? Tibet is part of the Games).
Olympic T-shirts and toy mascots can be had quite cheap from itinerant vendors on the streets, but the official ones of top quality are better bought at Silk Street Market in the Central Business District. Here you can get anything from Mongolian handicraft and The Little Red Book to jade, silk, tea and electronics (better acquired in Beijing’s two versions of Silicon Valley).
For rock-bottom bargains, go to the numerous flea markets such as Panjiayuan. But be careful with the haggling. If you’re not buying anything, just quietly walk away. These people can make a scene so much more dramatically than the Vietnamese vendors.
Shop only for those you can’t find in Manila, such as local products, as most items here are a little pricier. In the supermarket, a canister of potato chips is 35 RMB (1 yuan or RMB to P7), three pieces of banana are 20 RMB, and a bottle of bird’s nest is 1,700 RMB.
A Szechuan dinner of five dishes with a bottle of beverage in a wayside eatery is 75 RMB. Taxi flagdown is 10 RMB plus 2 RMB per kilometer. If you know your way around, go by bus for 1-11 RMB and by subway for 2 RMB or by bicycle for 10 RMB a day.
Wining and partying
For hip entertainment, fine dining and people-watching, go to clubs, restos and bistros such as Lan, Block 8, Centro, The World of Suzie Wong, Babyface, Blu Lobster, La Baie des Anges, Whampoa, Cargo, Aria.
Some of these are reused courtyard houses, apparently heritage structures, but you’d be surprised to find that the interiors have been designed by a Philippe Starck or a Johannes Thorpe.
For all-the-way entertainment, try what locals call Bar Street. These clubs and bars along Houhai Lake have plushy velvet sofas outside, looking ready for action right there on the sidewalk.
Foodies and nightlife lovers would be enchanted to discover that among the most happening places in the city are those funky restos and wine bars in the hutong, those interconnecting alleyways of Old Beijing rowed with boxlike houses.
This is the counterpart of our tenements and squatters’ area – see how the Chinese have turned them into what would eventually become heritage sites.
Cultural landmarks
If you’re culturally inclined, you may want to watch the Peking opera at the Imperial Granary or the Chinese acrobats at the Universal Theatre. Or visit any of the museums and art galleries such as the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art and the Working People’s Culture Palace.
If you have longer hours during breaks in the Games, you must see at least five landmarks: Tian’anmen Square; the Forbidden City; the Summer Palace; the Temple of Heaven; and the Great Wall, of course. Without having seen any one of them, it’s as if you hadn’t been to Beijing.
China is now touted by Westerners as a new superpower on the rise. We can only smile, because based on just those five heritage sites, China had been a superpower ages and civilizations ago.
Most probably it is its recent ascendancy in world economy that has occasioned that irrelevant epithet. The so-called proletariat state is now in the grip of capitalism which it purportedly renounces.
Of the country’s 1.4-billion people, 15 million live in Beijing—so you can imagine if even only a third of them are entrepreneurs what that can do to the economy. And that’s not counting the foreign investors.
We’d rather call it China’s neo-imperialism. This is palpably evident in Beijing’s rapid development, and not only for the Olympics but also because of that ancient sense of imperial birthright, the sense of privilege and supremacy, we suspect.
Chinese officials have cleverly used technology and architecture to send their message across, as Hitler once did with Albert Speer.
Architectural marvels
These marvels of new technology and design have become surefire crowd-drawers even to local tourists. They come in hordes, from toddlers to doddering old folks, from far-flung provinces to see some, even on crutches and in wheelchairs.
Two of the most recognizable structures of the Summer Games venue can be found near China Agricultural University. The most popular is the National Stadium, also called the Bird’s Nest, designed by Herzog & De Mueron with Arup and the China Architecture Design & Research Group. The other is the National Aquatics Centre, or the Water Cube. Even world-weary Westerners stare and stare.
Another new marvel of architecture is the odd-shaped China Central Television building, or CCTV, designed by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Sheeren. This has been selected among the Top 10 buildings in design by a British paper. Walking in its shadow is like something from Magritte — imagine the Rock of Gibraltar hovering above your head.
The apex of Chinese gigantism must be the new Capital International Airport, designed by Norman Foster. Touted as the biggest airport terminal in the world, it is the ultimate symbol of China’s neo-imperialism.
In this mad rush to build, Beijing’s ultramodern structures and futuristic skyscrapers seem to be nearly overtaking its sprawling historical and cultural landmarks. However, rapid development doesn’t necessarily mean one canceling the other.
In fact, we see the modern and the ancient comfortably coexisting in the palaces and temples shadowed by malls and high-rises, or in the onrushing Peugeot along a street swerving by a slow-moving camel from the Gobi Desert.
In this city of metaphors and contrasts, that about encapsulates everything under heaven.
By Constantino TejeroPhilippine Daily InquirerFirst Posted 04:13pm (Mla time) 08/04/2008
ONE IMPRESSION OF Beijing is that it’s forbidding. Its structures are gray hulking monoliths, particularly the government buildings. And its people look grim-faced and more robust than those in Taipei and Shanghai, for instance.
In China’s 5,000 years of history, since this city was made its capital some 850 years ago, one of the visions that stay longest in the foreigner’s mind is of bloodshed: the Boxer Rebellion, which laid siege to foreign legations and had to be put down by an international expeditionary force.
And then, all of a sudden, the world comes here to play. And the battle cry is “One World, One Dream”—the slogan of the 29th Olympic Games, which opens in Beijing at 8 p.m. on Aug. 8 (note the triple eight, considered a propitious number).
One might say it’s an empty slogan. We’re rather more charmed by the adages ubiquitous all over the city, such as this one writ large across an old building in a busy intersection: “History creates today, tradition creates civilization.”
Natural poetry
Such solemn maxims are taken matter-of-factly in this land of sages, along with the natural poetry of its people. As in the names of these establishments in the financial district: Everbright Bank; Dazzle Jewelry Shop.
Or these two salons near embassy row: New Feeling Styling Hair; Silk Flow Hairdressers. And this joint in the bar row: Pure Girl Bar. The poetry can be found even in the supermarket: Carefree Coffee; Golden Swallow Snack Foods.
Naturally it creeps up to the suburbs and countryside: Hundred-Fruit Orchard; Jujube Picking Garden; Sweet Hill Farmhouse. And this is not to mention those innumerable cultural and historical landmarks like the Red Sandalwood Museum and White Cloud Temple.
Peculiarly Chinese, yes, and frequently making one’s toes curl. But wait till you’ve seen how these people can turn a delicious pun, as in this ramshackle shop: Comfoot Shoes.
Shopping and dining
These are the signs of the times the visitor is likely to encounter all over the city this week, along with the emblem called Dancing Beijing, an abstracted image combining a seal, a Chinese character and the Olympic rings; and the cutesy mascots Beibei (the fish), Jingjing (the panda), Huanhuan (the Olympic flame), Nini (the swallow) and Yingying (the Tibetan antelope. See? Tibet is part of the Games).
Olympic T-shirts and toy mascots can be had quite cheap from itinerant vendors on the streets, but the official ones of top quality are better bought at Silk Street Market in the Central Business District. Here you can get anything from Mongolian handicraft and The Little Red Book to jade, silk, tea and electronics (better acquired in Beijing’s two versions of Silicon Valley).
For rock-bottom bargains, go to the numerous flea markets such as Panjiayuan. But be careful with the haggling. If you’re not buying anything, just quietly walk away. These people can make a scene so much more dramatically than the Vietnamese vendors.
Shop only for those you can’t find in Manila, such as local products, as most items here are a little pricier. In the supermarket, a canister of potato chips is 35 RMB (1 yuan or RMB to P7), three pieces of banana are 20 RMB, and a bottle of bird’s nest is 1,700 RMB.
A Szechuan dinner of five dishes with a bottle of beverage in a wayside eatery is 75 RMB. Taxi flagdown is 10 RMB plus 2 RMB per kilometer. If you know your way around, go by bus for 1-11 RMB and by subway for 2 RMB or by bicycle for 10 RMB a day.
Wining and partying
For hip entertainment, fine dining and people-watching, go to clubs, restos and bistros such as Lan, Block 8, Centro, The World of Suzie Wong, Babyface, Blu Lobster, La Baie des Anges, Whampoa, Cargo, Aria.
Some of these are reused courtyard houses, apparently heritage structures, but you’d be surprised to find that the interiors have been designed by a Philippe Starck or a Johannes Thorpe.
For all-the-way entertainment, try what locals call Bar Street. These clubs and bars along Houhai Lake have plushy velvet sofas outside, looking ready for action right there on the sidewalk.
Foodies and nightlife lovers would be enchanted to discover that among the most happening places in the city are those funky restos and wine bars in the hutong, those interconnecting alleyways of Old Beijing rowed with boxlike houses.
This is the counterpart of our tenements and squatters’ area – see how the Chinese have turned them into what would eventually become heritage sites.
Cultural landmarks
If you’re culturally inclined, you may want to watch the Peking opera at the Imperial Granary or the Chinese acrobats at the Universal Theatre. Or visit any of the museums and art galleries such as the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art and the Working People’s Culture Palace.
If you have longer hours during breaks in the Games, you must see at least five landmarks: Tian’anmen Square; the Forbidden City; the Summer Palace; the Temple of Heaven; and the Great Wall, of course. Without having seen any one of them, it’s as if you hadn’t been to Beijing.
China is now touted by Westerners as a new superpower on the rise. We can only smile, because based on just those five heritage sites, China had been a superpower ages and civilizations ago.
Most probably it is its recent ascendancy in world economy that has occasioned that irrelevant epithet. The so-called proletariat state is now in the grip of capitalism which it purportedly renounces.
Of the country’s 1.4-billion people, 15 million live in Beijing—so you can imagine if even only a third of them are entrepreneurs what that can do to the economy. And that’s not counting the foreign investors.
We’d rather call it China’s neo-imperialism. This is palpably evident in Beijing’s rapid development, and not only for the Olympics but also because of that ancient sense of imperial birthright, the sense of privilege and supremacy, we suspect.
Chinese officials have cleverly used technology and architecture to send their message across, as Hitler once did with Albert Speer.
Architectural marvels
These marvels of new technology and design have become surefire crowd-drawers even to local tourists. They come in hordes, from toddlers to doddering old folks, from far-flung provinces to see some, even on crutches and in wheelchairs.
Two of the most recognizable structures of the Summer Games venue can be found near China Agricultural University. The most popular is the National Stadium, also called the Bird’s Nest, designed by Herzog & De Mueron with Arup and the China Architecture Design & Research Group. The other is the National Aquatics Centre, or the Water Cube. Even world-weary Westerners stare and stare.
Another new marvel of architecture is the odd-shaped China Central Television building, or CCTV, designed by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Sheeren. This has been selected among the Top 10 buildings in design by a British paper. Walking in its shadow is like something from Magritte — imagine the Rock of Gibraltar hovering above your head.
The apex of Chinese gigantism must be the new Capital International Airport, designed by Norman Foster. Touted as the biggest airport terminal in the world, it is the ultimate symbol of China’s neo-imperialism.
In this mad rush to build, Beijing’s ultramodern structures and futuristic skyscrapers seem to be nearly overtaking its sprawling historical and cultural landmarks. However, rapid development doesn’t necessarily mean one canceling the other.
In fact, we see the modern and the ancient comfortably coexisting in the palaces and temples shadowed by malls and high-rises, or in the onrushing Peugeot along a street swerving by a slow-moving camel from the Gobi Desert.
In this city of metaphors and contrasts, that about encapsulates everything under heaven.
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