Friday 25 December 2009

Wednesday 23 December 2009

Xi Chuan and the idea of self


Visiting poet shares Chinese experiences
Display_xichuan-joshthompson(dsc01154)1-
JOSH THOMPSON
Chinese poet Xi Chuan was the Orion Visiting Lecturer this semester.

Dec 02, 2009 11:31 PM

Growing up in China, poet Xi Chuan had trouble with the idea of self. He believed he had many selves, each vying for control.
“I am a hotel of persons,” he said during his reading at Open Space Gallery on Sunday, Nov. 29. “A hotel of persons, ghosts and evils.”
Those selves were on display in a series of poems that Chuan shared with the audience, each showing different facets of the poet. Chuan has been well-known in the literary scene since the ‘80s, when he co-founded a poetry journal that was banned after only three issues under Communist China rule.
He is best known for his long prose poems, and has won many awards — including the Modern Chinese Poetry Prize in 1994 and the national Lu Xun Prize in 2001.
Chuan was the Orion Visiting Lecturer at UVic this semester.
Students, faculty and community members came out to hear him read his poems on Sunday, both in Mandarin and English.
“I’m nervous,” Chuan told the crowd before beginning, admitting he still feels slightly uncomfortable reading in English.
While the poems were powerful and beautiful, it was when Chuan spoke in Mandarin that the words really came to life. Though most of the audience may not have understood a word he was saying, the poems had a theatrical quality bolstered by Chuan’s commanding voice.
Chuan also regaled the audience with tales from China, saying his work changed significantly after he lost two friends in the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.
“I felt I did not know how to write,” he told the audience.
When he regained confidence in the early ‘90s, his work was transformed.
Chuan’s work is melancholic, but sprinkled with humor. His poems have names like “The Beast” and “Meaningless Life.” Near the end of the reading, Chuan acknowledged the dark tone.
“I’ve read a lot of dark things, I know, with absurdities,” he said.
However, he ended with a poem about Utopia, imagining a world where there is no pollution and everyone has enough money and food. It was a dazzling dream and a powerful vision of a perfect world.
At the end, Chuan simply said “thank you” into the mic and was met with rousing applause. He gave an embarrassed smile and left the podium.
UVic writing professor Tim Lilburn hosted the event, and has been close friends with Chuan for many years. He ended the reading with an interview with Chuan.
“[Chuan] is not just a great Chinese poet, but a great world poet,” Lilburn said.
UVic Writing Department Chair Joan McLeod said it was a unique experience to have Chuan at UVic.
“It’s been so great, not only for the students but also for the faculty, to have someone from the other side of the world here,” she said.
Chuan’s work can be read in the latest issue of Grain Magazine.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

All hail the printed word: Best books of 2009 - Entertainment - Books - bnd.com

Eslite Bookstore in Taichung Chung-yo Departme...Image via Wikipedia
The year 2009 has been a good year for fiction of all kinds. Here is a selection of the best..........

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Snowy White for Xmas


Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, 1565, Piete...Image via Wikipedia
Is a white Christmas just a dream?
By Anthony Reuben
BBC News
With swaths of the country blanketed by snow, there has been growing speculation that 2009 will be a white Christmas for many. But how common really is snow on 25 December in the UK?

Many of us think of the Christmases of our youth as being snow-laden festivals of sledging and snowball fights.
But that may have more to do with romanticised notions old fashioned Christmases than anything we have lived through. The "Little Ice Age", a period of global cooling that ran between about 1550 and 1850, meant white Christmases were not uncommon in centuries gone by. Its influence is still there in the classic literature of the time and traditional Christmas card designs.
Reliable figures on Christmas snow coverage only go back about half a century. The Met Office has records showing the number of its weather stations around the UK reporting snow lying at 9am on Christmas Day since 1957.
In 29 of the 52 years since then, there has been no snow reported at any of the stations.
ODDS OF A WHITE CHRISTMAS
  •  London 2/1

  •  Glasgow 11/10

  •  Belfast 9/4

  •  Cardiff 9/4 Source: William Hill at 1000 GMT on 22 December

  • A further 11 years had less than 5% reporting snow and only once in that period - in 1981 - have more than half of them reported snow.
    Many parts of the UK have seen unusually early snow in 2009, but in fact Christmas is quite early for snow in the UK. It is more likely to snow in January.
    Snow lying on the ground may be enough to make many of us remember a white Christmas, but it's not sufficient for anyone who fancies a flutter.
    The bookies stipulate that a white Christmas requires snow to actually fall on the day itself. Amounts vary from a single flake for Ladbrokes to at least 1mm at a local airport for Paddy Power.
    But as a cold-spell struck in the run-up to Christmas 2009, the odds on the first white Christmas in London since 1999 have fallen to their worst level for 30 years, according to William Hill.
    So there is a decent chance you will see snow on Christmas Day, but bear in mind that if you do it will probably be an unusual sight and not a return to the halcyon days of your misremembered childhood.

    Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

    Aamir Khan


    Bollywood looks to Aamir Khan to end 2009 on a high
    MUMBAI — Bollywood is looking to Aamir Khan to bring festive cheer to the industry after a disappointing 2009 hit by a producers' strike, swine flu fears and a lack of box office success.
    The actor-producer-director's heavily-marketed "3 Idiots", based on Chetan Bhagat's best-selling debut novel "Five Point Someone" about three struggling students at a business school, is released on Friday, Christmas Day.
    Bollywood watchers hope Khan -- known for only making one big film per year in an industry where leading actors can be working on several films at the same time -- can replicate his previous year-end successes.
    His 2008 Christmas offering, "Ghajini", became Bollywood's highest grossing film and followed the acclaimed "Taare Zameen Par" (Stars on Earth) in 2007.
    "We hope he creates a hattrick this year," said Amod Mehra, a Bollywood trade analyst.
    Another leading critic, Taran Adarsh, gave the film 4.5 stars on his bollywoodhungama.com site and said it "easily ranks amongst Aamir, (director) Rajkumar Hirani and (producer) Vidhu Vinod Chopra's finest films".
    Bollywood began 2009 after a muted end to 2008 due to the deadly terror attacks in Mumbai, which saw the cancellation of a number of films.
    Audiences had already dwindled due to recession fears and disaffection at under-performing big budget films.
    But the much-anticipated "Chandni Chowk To China", a co-production with US studio Warner Brothers and the first Bollywood film to be part-filmed in China, bombed at the box office.
    Leading star Shahrukh Khan's own production "Billu" also disappointed, as world attention focused on the British film about a Mumbai teaboy, "Slumdog Millionaire", and its runaway success at the Oscars.
    In April, Bollywood producers began a two-month boycott of multiplex cinemas, calling for a fairer share of box office receipts. The strike saw the postponement of scores of films and losses estimated at 63 million dollars.
    Rising numbers of swine flu cases in Mumbai and the surrounding area added to Bollywood's woes, leading to the temporary closure of cinemas on public health grounds and the postponement of several films.
    Despite a glut of new releases since then, only a handful of films have been considered hits, like "New York", about a group of friends in the city on September 11, 2001, and the thriller "Kaminey" (Scoundrel).
    A new hero was found in Ranbir Kapoor after his hit "Wake Up Sid" and "Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani" (An Amazing Story Of Strange Love), while Salman Khan made a successful comeback in "Wanted".
    But Adarsh told AFP: "It's not been a good year. In my opinion, it's been the worst year for the film industry.
    "You can't blame anyone apart from the industry for churning out such bad movies. This results in perhaps 90 percent of films failing. It's not a good situation. We need to concentrate on quality."
    Mayank Shekhar, national cultural editor at English-language newspaper The Hindustan Times, agreed and suggested that Hollywood -- which still has only a tiny market share but is trying to make inroads into India -- has benefited.
    Roland Emmerich's "2012" crossed the 900 million rupees (19.2 million dollars) mark last weekend, making it the highest grossing Hollywood film in India, The Times of India newspaper said on Sunday.
    Dubbed and original versions of James Cameron's "Avatar" and the hit comedy "The Hangover" have also done well.
    Shekhar said "2012" would turn out to be the biggest hit in India this year, and had proved popular in both more expensive urban multiplex cinemas and traditional single screen cinemas in small towns and villages.
    "This is the first time we've seen something like this. It may be an indicator of things to come, that people are now willing to choose," he told AFP.
    "The Indian movie market has been the only one in the world where no one cares that (Hollywood director Steven) Spielberg is releasing a film. That might change."

    Tuesday 15 December 2009

    Poetry in 2009

    In My Craft or Sullen Art (Dylan Thomas) - Kni...Image by chrisjohnbeckett via Flickr
    This year, 2009 has been remarkable in the number of new poetry books published.
    Enhanced by Zemanta

    A range of views ......Books of/for 2009

    Books of the year: what kept you turning the pages?Was it Thomas Cromwell's machinations, a frustrated MP's diaries, or a novelist's treatment of his father's suicide? We asked a few people.......

    The Observer, Sunday 22 November 2009 Article history

    Avid readers: (from left) Melvyn Bragg, Kazuo Ishiguro, Joan Bakewell, David Cameron, Vivienne Westwood. Illustration: Lyndon Hayes



    Peter Carey – novelist



    Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows (Bloomsbury) has huge ambition and an author equal to the task. Travelling from Nagasaki to Guantánamo, this very beautiful novel sets out to grasp the nettle of our modern history. The most utilitarian of us will find it "relevant and contemporary". At the same time, it is a work of art, as human as the feel of another's hand. Colum McCann once wrote himself inside the skin of Nureyev. In Zoli he created Romany characters that Romany readers have been pleased to own. Now, in Let the Great World Spin (Bloomsbury) [winner this week of the National Book Award for fiction], he has reinvented the city of New York in all its breathing, fighting, whining, joyous clamour.



    Wendy Cope – poet

    In January, Areté Books published A Scattering, Christopher Reid's tribute to his late wife, Lucinda. His poems about marital love and bereavement are immensely moving. Reid is a first-rate poet and this is his best book to date. Later in the year, the same author came up with something quite different. The Song of Lunch (CB Editions) is a witty narrative about a publisher meeting an old flame in an Italian restaurant. The story is sad, as well as funny, and very enjoyable.



    Kazuo Ishiguro – novelist

    My reading this year was dominated by Roberto Bolaño's two massive novels, The Savage Detectives and 2666 (both Picador). The first is the superior, but 2666, for all its occasional longueurs, is still quite magnificent. Bolaño links seamlessly South American, US and European traditions; modernism with gritty realism and the crime thriller. These are both important works and the advent of Bolaño is a significant moment in the history of modern fiction.



    Peter Conrad – Observer critic

    My choice is Simon Mawer's novel The Glass Room (Little, Brown). Imagine the house of fiction as a clean, shining, transparent box, befouled by some of the nastiest episodes in recent history. A small saga, beautifully conceived and deeply moving.



    Hari Kunzru – novelist

    One of the most compelling recent fictional depictions of Manhattan is Richard Price's Lush Life (Bloomsbury), out this year in paperback, which takes place on the streets of the Lower East Side, a few blocks from where I live. Price's low-key crime thriller is also a pointed look at gentrification and social exclusion, more Zola than Raymond Chandler. His ear for dialogue is extraordinary, as evidenced by his superlative work on The Wire. Also examining the lives of the dispossessed is The Story of My Assassins by Tarun J Tejpal (HarperCollins), an Indian novel that appears to have been overlooked in the general rush to adore The White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire. Less crisp then either but with a much richer understanding of the politics of poverty – the author is a leading investigative journalist – it deserves wider attention.



    Dominic West – actor

    Josephine Hart's The Truth About Love (Virago) is a devastating account of grief and loss and the truth and lies that bind us to our family and to our country. Her language is beautiful, her characters rich and funny, and she has the courage to expose the deceit behind nationalism. It is also painfully personal and, like all great works of art, one is aware how much it cost her to write it.



    Jackie Kay – writer

    A very strong year for poetry. I was particularly moved by Fred D'Aguiar's Continental Shelf (Carcanet). The heart of the book is a series of elegiac sonnets about the Virginia Tech massacre. D'Aguiar teaches there; his poems evoke the process of trying to work out what life means in the face of such senseless murder. Rain by Don Paterson (Faber) was another favourite of mine. Paterson is simply one of the best living poets in the UK. Kachi A Ozumba's The Shadow of a Smile (Alma Books) is a brilliantly funny and gripping novel that examines the corruption and hypocrisy within the Nigerian justice system.



    Philip French – Observer film critic

    The most valuable movie book of 2009 is Joseph P Kennedy's Hollywood Years by Cari Beauchamp (Faber), a meticulously researched account of how the Bostonian scoundrel established the family fortune in the movie business and remained in influential contact with Tinseltown until his dying day. Antony Beevor's D-Day (Allen Lane) is a brilliantly organised, eye-opening epic about the world's greatest military campaign. With his second brick-sized volume, Family Britain 1951-57 (Bloomsbury), David Kynaston magnificently continues his sociocultural history of postwar Britain, bringing my formative years into sharper focus on every page.



    Shami Chakrabarti – civil rights campaigner

    Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury) has reconfirmed my long-held view that great fiction is capable of inspiring progressive insight and action well beyond the reach of political polemic, philosophy, documentary or even law. Shamsie achieves the near impossibility of a truly intimate epic tale. The multiple identities of various members of her complex family of characters are explored across continents and decades. Cataclysmic world events from the atomic bomb at Nagasaki to the Twin Towers atrocity are treated with a subtlety and humanity often lacking from political writing. I challenge anyone to put this book down lightly or not to identify with at least one of its many flawed and yet irresistibly human characters.



    Kirsty Wark – broadcaster

    Rarely do I read a new novel and immediately resolve to read it again, but Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn (Viking), the tender and spare story of a young Irish girl's emigration to the Brooklyn of the 1950s, merits revisiting. Tóibín has infused his group of female characters with humour and sadness, and his evocation of their precarious journey to a new life seems to me pitch-perfect. Nigel Slater's Tender Volume 1 (HarperCollins) – hurrah, there's more to come – is to be savoured as much as his baked onions, porcini and cream.



    David Cameron – politician

    Every once in a while, political diaries emerge that are so irreverent and insightful that they are destined to be handed out as leaving presents in offices across Whitehall for years to come. Chris Mullin's A View From the Foothills (Profile) is one such book. Its humour and self-deprecation more than make up for the nagging feeling it leaves behind that The Thick of It may not always be all that far from the truth. All politicians need to read honest accounts of war – at no time more than now – and Patrick Hennessey's The Junior Officers' Reading Club (Allen Lane) is one of the very best. There is even some humour in it and plenty of insight. Its engrossing narratives on 21st-century warfare and its effects are guaranteed to remain in the mind long after the book is finished.



    Mary Warnock – philosopher

    The book that has interested me most this year has the rebarbative title Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Matthew R Broome and Lisa Bortolotti (Oxford University Press). It is a collection of very varied essays on subjects such as the nature of mental illness, whether psychiatry is a science, and why so-called personality disorder can't be treated, all matters of great interest in themselves, but also of relevance to criminal law and sentencing policy. Despite its title, it is a gripping read. Not so gripping, however, as Robert Harris's Lustrum (Hutchinson). Ever since Imperium I've been longing for the next instalment and it doesn't disappoint. It's a marvellous novel.



    Colm Tóibin – novelist

    Chloe Hooper's The Tall Man (Jonathan Cape) is the chilling story of the death in custody of an Aboriginal prisoner in Australia. It is told with a novelist's eye for detail and flair for narrative, but there is also a passionate engagement with the story in all its complexity and a sort of rage that make the book utterly compelling. David Vann's Legend of a Suicide (Viking) is equally gripping. For the imagery alone and for the sentences, the book would be a treasure, but the story it tells – the story of the suicide of the author's father – has an immediacy and sharpness made all the more special by the tone of distance in the narrative and the beauty of the writing. In poetry, Don Paterson's Rain (Faber) displays one of the greatest poets now writing anywhere at his most wise and wry and eloquent.



    David Kynaston – historian

    Arguably the finest British diarist since Virginia Woolf has now, in James Lees-Milne, found his fitting memorial. Michael Bloch's biography (John Murray) is admirably judged: warm, but not hagiographical; sufficiently candid about Lees-Milne's many loves (including, in an often masochistic relationship, his ghastly wife, Alvilde); and acutely revealing about the demons that drove him. Lees-Milne may not have been quite a Pepys, and Bloch is not a Claire Tomalin, but subject and author are here perfectly matched.



    Sam Mendes – director

    I was touched by Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs (Harper US), an honest and funny account of the struggles of being a father; gripped by Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail (Allen Lane), a superbly researched and sobering take on the events surrounding the meltdown on Wall Street; and mesmerised by Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin (Bloomsbury), a wonderful book that puts its author right at the front rank of contemporary novelists.



    Michael Palin – broadcaster

    Sara Wheeler's The Magnetic North (Jonathan Cape) provides acute insights into life north of the Arctic Circle. Abundant energy resources and the alarmingly swift effects of global warming make this a fascinating and relevant journey; she uses human stories to inform and enlighten us.



    Roy Hattersley – politician and historian

    Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Penguin) is a biography of Abraham Lincoln, a history of the American Civil War, vignettes of half-a-dozen 19th-century American politicians and a textbook on good government. It is written in such a compelling style that, despite the complexities of the characters and the subtlety of the arguments, the reader zips through. The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (Allen Lane) confirms, scientifically, what social democrats have always hoped was true: the better-off have much to gain from redistribution of wealth, since the more equal societies are spared much of the social evil that afflicts modern society. The confirmation that morality and expediency do coincide comes as a great relief in a disturbing year.



    Geoff Dyer – novelist

    The Music Room (Picador) is William Fiennes's memoir of growing up in a rambling old castle. This unusual home and upbringing are evoked with great beauty and poignancy (his epileptic brother, Richard, is an increasingly vulnerable and volatile presence), in ravishing prose, but the book has another, strangely hypnotic effect, enfolding the reader in memories of a child's view of the world that seems universal. Well, maybe not if you grew up in the drug-ruined ghettos of west Baltimore. The Corner (Canongate) by David Simon and Ed Burns came out in the US in 1997, but had to wait until we all went gaga about The Wire to be published here. It's an unforgettable, devastating account of neighbourhoods and generations in the process of being laid waste.



    Geordie Greig – journalist

    The greatest living master of the short story, William Trevor, has written a jewel of a novel with Love and Summer (Viking). It is a story set in 1950s Ireland where the small-town characters are torn by love, disappointment, revenge and compassion. At 81, this brilliant Irish author still demonstrates his ability to show the subtler shades of unrequited passion.



    Ayaan Hirsi Ali – writer

    Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (Allen Lane) zooms in on the challenges of Muslim migration to Europe, telling the story with an outsider's eye. It's a disturbing read but a necessary wake-up call.



    Curtis Sittenfeld – novelist

    I really enjoyed the essay collection Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman (Doubleday). A friend sent me the book after I had my first baby last spring, and I found Waldman – who graduated from Harvard Law School and worked as a public defender before having four children – to be frank, insightful, and very funny. Waldman's a somewhat controversial writer in the US, known for being outspoken and also for being married to the novelist Michael Chabon, and as I read I did sometimes think, wow, you're really revealing that about yourself and your family? But her honesty kept me turning pages, and after each essay, I felt like I'd just had a conversation with a smart and outrageous friend.



    Jeremy Paxman – broadcaster

    There are three books that I have particularly enjoyed recently: I was gripped by Simon Mawer's The Glass Room (Little, Brown), chortled through Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (Michael Joseph) and learned a lot from Allan Mallinson's The Making of the British Army (Bantam).



    Malcolm Gladwell – writer

    I cannot remember enjoying a book as much as Iain Pears's Stone's Fall (Jonathan Cape). It's more adventurous even than Pears's earlier classic, An Instance of the Fingerpost. We should stop calling Pears a genre writer of thrillers and, as we have done for John le Carré, simply call him a great novelist.



    Eric Hobsbawm – historian

    In its original German version, I found Hans Magnus Enzensberger's The Silences of Hammerstein a virtuoso combination of research, reportage and imagination, as good an introduction as any to the Weimar Republic, impossible to put down. This is the story of Kurt von Hammerstein, the last (and anti-Nazi) general commanding the German army before Hitler came to power, and his children, divided between communists, ex-communists and 1944 military conspirators. It has now been beautifully published in English by Seagull Books in, of all places, Calcutta. Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso) is both a welcome and, in the case of Israel, much needed exercise in the dismantling of nationalist historical myth and a plea for an Israel that belongs equally to all its inhabitants. Perhaps books combining passion and erudition don't change political situations, but if they did, this one would count as a landmark.



    Philip Hensher – novelist

    Two blockbusters, made out of writing of brevity and concision, were the highlights of my reading year. Blake Bailey's exemplary life of John Cheever (Picador) was full of its subject's inimitable voice, ruthless, hilarious, cruel and drink-sodden. In some ways, the story is a terrifying one – Cheever descended to psychic depths few of us will even witness – but it should always be remembered that this greatest of American novelists was, above all, extremely funny. The only thing wrong with the new, two-volume Collected Stories of William Trevor was the repulsively cheap paper Penguin printed it on – the ink smeared underneath my fingers, which is no way to treat the greatest living exponent of the short story in English. The Booker panel might, too, have found a space for Trevor's miraculous Love and Summer (Viking), a late-period summation of thought and expression if ever I saw one. But the best novel of the year was Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs (Faber), both traumatic and dazzlingly witty; scenes you wish you could forget, sentences you were grateful for.



    Fergus Henderson – chef

    My nomination is Fernand Point's Ma Gastronomie (Duckworth). It's a collection of the great man's (he truly was a great man) recipes, thoughts, menus. Point was the chef of La Pyramide restaurant near Lyon, a legend and mentor to a generation of chefs. He started his day with the barber coming to shave him and two magnums of champagne. Not bad.



    Tim Adams – Observer writer

    As a reminder of why great journalism has not much to do with Twitter updates and round-the-clock opinion, I've carried a couple of volumes with me: Michael Frayn's Travels With a Typewriter (Faber) and Ian Jack's The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain (Jonathan Cape). Both collections are testament to a lifetime of intimate looking and to the hard labour of getting the world out there on to the page. The patience and intelligence of their storytelling is a good antidote to all that buzzes.



    Daljit Nagra – poet

    At this time of year, Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice (Allen Lane) is a sober analysis of how we arrive at notions of justice. Sen uses examples from eastern and western traditions to help elucidate his abstract arguments. Sobriety is also maintained through two remarkable poetry collections. Both Christopher Reid's A Scattering (Areté Books) and Don Paterson's Rain (Faber) are haunted by the loss of loved ones. While Reid's heartbreakingly spare narrative about the death of his wife is moving for its simplicity of expression, Paterson's collection has an Augustan frankness, an Elizabethan elegance and a postmodern playfulness.



    Melvyn Bragg – novelist and broadcaster

    Diarmaid MacCulloch's monumental A History of Christianity (Allen Lane) is essential reading for those enthralled by Christianity and for those enraged by it, while those who protest indifference may be ambushed by surprise at its force in world culture over the millenniums. Francis Wheen is a superb, idiosyncratic chronicler of our times and Strange Days Indeed (Fourth Estate) is a glittering, pinpointed view on the 1970s. Wheen has a scholar's mind, the energy of a supercharged magpie and a lofty wit that never sours.



    Nicholas Hytner – director

    This year, I've read some wonderfully enjoyable novels. The fastest page-turner, dry-mouthed and sweaty-palmed, was William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms (Bloomsbury). Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate) was every bit as good as they said it was. And Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn (Viking) moved me more than any other book this year: a miraculously empathetic journey across the Atlantic and back again with a young Irish woman, ordinarily lonely, ordinarily in love, ordinarily fickle – but her every thought and action quite extraordinarily truthful. A short masterpiece.



    Joan Bakewell – broadcaster and novelist

    A View From the Foothills by Chris Mullin (Profile) is a political diary that stands with the best, alongside Alan Clark and Chips Channon. Mullin never made it to the political heights, but his experience of being a junior minister under Tony Blair – referred to throughout as "the Man" – is full of cunning humour. We know from his earlier Austerity Britain how thorough David Kynaston is, but I was apprehensive that the 1950s, which he tackles in Family Britain 1951-57 (Bloomsbury), would simply be too dull. Far from it. Kynaston has dredged reminiscences, diaries, political archives, newspapers and magazines for every scrap of interest and detail.



    Bidisha – critic

    I've been getting into some dark, thoughtful adult mystery fiction this year. One of my favourite books has been The Owl Killers by Karen Maitland (Michael Joseph), which is about a superstitious, uptight, pagan village of mad paranoiacs tormented by the arrival of a community of women. Think Wicker Man meets The Handmaid's Tale with a whiff of Deliverance. I was also extremely impressed by The Forest of Hands and Teeth, the debut novel by Carrie Ryan (Gollancz). It's a post-apocalyptic political zombie allegory with a gothic flavour.



    Vivienne Westwood – fashion designer

    My recommended read is The Vanishing Face of Gaia by James Lovelock (Allen Lane). At somewhere between 400 and 500 parts per million (ppm) of CO² in the atmosphere, the Earth will settle down to a new equilibrium of 5C hotter than now. Our luscious, comfortable world will be gone. What is left will support about a fifth of the present population. We must plan.



    Ken Livingstone – politician

    Seth G Jones's In the Graveyard of Empires (Norton) is a devastating critique of the mismanagement of the Afghan war by the US and Britain, whose argument is all the stronger because his perspective is not from the left. The book reveals that things are worse than we suspect and even an old cynic like myself was shocked at some of the revelations. In The Spirit Level (Allen Lane), Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett offer proof that most of the ills of our "broken society" arise out of the growing inequality of the past 30 years. If Tony Blair had known this, his could have been one of the three great reforming governments of the last century to stand alongside 1906 and 1945. And Mandelson would have known why he shouldn't have been so relaxed about the filthy rich.



    Nick Hornby – novelist

    Wells Tower's superb collection of short stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Granta), is dark and funny, and in Tower's case, the former quality does not negate the latter. When, in one of the stories, a woman finds out that her husband is having an affair because the footprint on the car windscreen does not match her own, you know you're reading somebody who doesn't come along very often. My favourite work of non-fiction this year was written by the Observer's art critic – I'm sorry, but there we are. Laura Cumming's brilliant book about self-portraits, A Face to the World (HarperPress), positively fizzes with ideas; just about every single paragraph contains a fresh observation, not just about art but about human nature. The author has got me running around galleries I haven't been to in years.



    Colum McCann – novelist

    Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (McSweeney's Books; published here in February by Hamish Hamilton) is an examination of America in the time of Katrina, an indictment of bureaucracy, a testimony to the possibility of goodness, a level-headed look at Muslim America, a heartbreaking rap sheet for the Bush years, all this and more... I was completely enthralled by this book from one of the most socially engaged and provocative writers of our times. The Infinities (Picador) is John Banville's best book, I think. The prose is honed, as always, and every word matters, but the book breathes with humour and shines with a lovely discursive wink. It's also the sort of novel that you nod along to, then it swerves and you don't quite know where you are, but you experience the thrill of being suitably lost.



    Mariella Frostrup – writer and broadcaster

    This year's Booker winner, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate), caught my eye early on when I interviewed her about it on Open Book on Radio 4. Having spotted its potential, I wish I'd followed through with a call to William Hill! Two novels by Antipodean authors also figured highly this year: Richard Flanagan's Wanting (Atlantic Books), a brutal evocation of the fate of a young Aboriginal girl, adopted by the governor of Van Diemen's Land and his wife, and later discarded; and David Malouf's Ransom (Chatto), a wonderful retelling of the encounter between Achilles and the Trojan King Priam in prose that's so good you want to eat it.



    Andrew Rawnsley – Observer columnist

    Chris Mullin produced an account, both highly hilarious and deeply depressing, of the futility of much ministerial life in his diaries, A View From the Foothills (Profile). Politics on a much grander canvas was brilliantly brought to life by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her superb Team of Rivals (Penguin) about the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. A timely and penetrating audit of authoritarianism around the world came from John Kampfner's Freedom for Sale (Simon & Schuster). While highly critical of the trajectory of the present government, he does not level the lazy charge made by some that we already live in "a police state".



    David Vann – novelist

    Elegant and controlled, Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn (Viking), the tale of Eilis, a young woman who emigrates from Ireland to America in the 1950s, is the book that broke my heart this year. Eilis is so close and intimate. I'm scared for her, homesick, become thrilled as she falls in love and then, when tragedy strikes her family back in Ireland, the world has gone empty and I'm grieving with her. This is not the end, though. It's only the beginning of what becomes a choice straight out of Greek tragedy, a choice that cannot be made. What's at risk is everything: the new world and the old, family, love, self, belonging. I tend to like stylists, lyrical landscapes, showier stuff and I forget that the most ambitious landscape, finally, is the human heart.



    Chris Mullin – writer and politician

    John Campbell's Pistols at Dawn (Jonathan Cape) is a masterly account of great political feuds of the past two centuries, starting with William Pitt and Charles James Fox and ending with Brown and Blair. And something completely different was Dead I May Well Be (Serpent's Tail), part one of a gripping trilogy by Adrian McKinty, introducing Michael Forsyth, a young hoodlum escaping the troubles of Belfast only to find himself embroiled in the murky, violent underworld of New York's Irish gangsters. Taut, lean prose and dialogue up there with Elmore Leonard. McKinty hasn't had the attention he deserves.



    Julie Myerson – novelist

    I loved the energy, humour and fizz of Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs (Faber) – so oddball in places that it ought not to have worked, but it did, totally. Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger (Virago) is proper, muscle-flexing storytelling – I was in awe and I just did not want it to end. And the very first novel I read this year was Anita Brookner's Strangers (Fig Tree). No one writes with more skill and honesty about the human condition and this book is possibly her finest.



    Nigel Slater – food writer

    I have been trying to read Monty Don's The Ivington Diaries (Bloomsbury) in short daily segments, so that the beautifully written story of his astonishing Herefordshire garden will last all year. I cannot bear to think I will come to the end. Phyllida Law's Notes to My Mother-in-Law (Fourth Estate) is something I wolfed in one glorious bite: funny, tender and deeply touching, it is something for the Christmas stocking of anyone who has ever had to look after an elderly relative.



    Robert McCrum – Observer writer

    David Kynaston's series Tales of New Jerusalem grows in confidence with each volume. Family Britain 1951-57 (Bloomsbury) takes us back to the post-austerity world of Supermac, Suez, Kenwood mixers and the Comet that now seems like a cloudless idyll. But the great quality of Kynaston's astonishing research is his cool, unsentimental eye for telling anecdote – for instance, the vicious press hysteria that surrounded the hanging of Ruth Ellis.



    Romola Garai – actress

    The Complete Stories of JG Ballard (published in a new edition by Norton in the US) offers the reader a minute dissection of the human heart and mind. It has been on my bedside table for months, as I couldn't bring myself to move it; I couldn't let it go. The Rapture by Liz Jensen (Bloomsbury) also got under my skin. It is one of the very few books I have dreamed about. It is a powerful and violent novel and also a terrifically gripping read.



    Ross Raisin – novelist

    I bang on about David Vann's Legend of a Suicide (Viking) at the slightest opportunity, so this seems like a particularly good place to do it. Much of the review coverage has concentrated on form – whether the book is a novel, memoir or a collection of short stories, and how our preconceptions about these things affect our reading. Interesting as this question is, I first read the book in an unmarked dustjacket with no idea what it was and it turned out to be the most powerful and lucid piece of writing I have read for more years than just this one.





    Rachel Cooke – Observer critic

    Like everyone, I loved Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate), but I was spooked by it, too. The voice is so true: I have my suspicions that Hilary Mantel actually is Thomas Cromwell. The Help by Kathryn Stockett (Fig Tree) is set in segregated Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, and it's an exciting and atmospheric story about what happens when one privileged white woman gets just a little too close to the town's maids – the "help" of the title. Anna Minton's Ground Control (Penguin) is a short but thought-provoking polemic about 21st-century Britain, with its gated communities, its privately owned shopping centres and its "regenerated" cultural and business districts. A book that will make you as mad as hell.



    Tristram Hunt – historian

    Three very important books for the intellectual regeneration of the left hit the shelves this year. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level (Allen Lane) delivered a statistically clinical account of the benefits of social democracy for living longer, happier and more fulfilled lives; Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (The Bodley Head) was a powerful wake-up call for the progressive left to have some faith in its Enlightenment project; and the great Amartya Sen provided a political route-map for delivering social justice in his compelling work, The Idea of Justice (Allen Lane). For sheer historical enjoyment there was Christian Wolmar's Blood, Iron and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World (Atlantic Books), which chronicles the railway's global growth with characteristic brio.



    Craig Raine – poet

    William Golding by John Carey (Faber) is a trove of astonishing new facts and a timely reminder of what a great, unflinching, unsparing, unorthodox, consistently surprising writer Golding was. The last hundred pages of the 800-page The Letters of TS Eliot Volume 2 1923-1925 (Faber) put us at the centre of the Eliot marriage as it detonates. Not everything is clear. It is an explosion after all – so, an eerie sensation of stillness, brute shock waves and the intimate dust still settling on the skin.


    Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

    Sunday 6 December 2009

    Sylvia Plath

    Collection of PoetryImage by vintagecat via Flickr

    Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

    Tuesday 10 March 2009

    Fiction & Nurturing Souls!!!

    Fiction nurtures the soul - a must for even hard-hearted politicians
    Chris Bowen
    March 11, 2009

    Page 1 of 2 Single Page View

    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...
    Page
    1 2
    Single Page View
    Ads by Google

    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.

    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.

    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:

    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

    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