Poetic Licence

Penarth for young writers........

2011-04-19T20:06:00.000+01:00

Budding Penarth writer reaches national competition final

4:20pm Tuesday 19th April 2011

A BUDDING young writer from Penarth has been selected as a finalist in a national writing competition.

Anna Webster is in the running for the Royal Mail’s Young Welsh Letter Writer Competition 2011.

The theme for the competition was children’s favourite books - which the Royal Mail celebrated by releasing a stamp collection featuring A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh.

Nine-year-old Evenlode pupil Anna impressed the judges with her creative letter, which focused on The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips, by Michael Morpurgo, told from the perspective of the protagonist, Tips the cat.

The youngster said the book was an obvious choice.

"It’s my favourite book and Tips is my favourite character, so that’s why I chose it!" she said.

"It was a nice surprise to be selected for the final."

Judge Val Bodden, Royal Mail Media Relations Manager, said Anna had shown real flair and imagination.

"The competition recognises the nation’s best young letter writers and encourages children to be creative through writing," she said.

"All the letters were fun and imaginative, but Anna obviously thought about the subject and put her own stamp on her story - and that made her stand out."

The competition was held in partnersip with UK-wide charity Afasic, which seeks to help children with speech, language and communication needs.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

2010-11-02T12:07:00.000Z

Image via Wikipedia

Freedom: A novel Review

There has been much in the press and on TV recently about Franken’s “Freedom”, enough to fill the pages of many reviews - so what is the fuss all about?

Could it be that the book is a brilliant story with real characters? Perhaps the writing complements the scope of the long narrative? Maybe Franken has captured the essence of the age and distilled it into memorable fiction? Perhaps this is a book in the long tradition of the Great American Novel and worthy of inclusion?

Sadly none of this is true.

It's certainly not the plot because the plot is all over the place and it’s not the writing because his style and quality is uneven and sometimes tedious. There are few memorable lines let alone passages of outstanding language or poetry.

So could it be brilliant because of the characters?

Like Patty Berglund, or like Walter Berglund, her husband or the other main character that drives the essence of the novel, Richard Kratz. Unfortunately not – anything much in the characterization except caricature. Nothing here that is real. All the characters, main or otherwise, just seem to exist in their own selfish capsules, occasionally brought out to mix and seemingly influence each other. But I always felt they were talking and engaging with themselves – little dialogues in their own heads, sex in their own heads, ordinariness made special in their own heads.

The mark of a great novel is not only that it feels true but also that it captures truth. Look anywhere in this novel, and you'll see how it fails to reflect true relationships, fails to reflect the history of our time and fails to live up to all the hype. So both on the scale of the intimate and everyday and on the world-view, nothing is captured that can move us forward.

As I read through the novel I felt confronted by set pieces, cardboard characters, the politics of the author neatly parceled for understanding. None of these things did I expect of the author of “Corrections”. I felt too often Franzen was indulging himself and his audience. This was a man trying to write a best seller. And it’s a particular kind of best-seller – it has to be cool. Everything that is good in Franzen’s world is about “coolness”. The way people dress, their music, their jobs all reflect being cool.

Well he’ll make a “cool” few million from the book but it’s the nearest he’ll get to greatness. His followers will not universally like this book. Take for example the ending – The ending is tacky, sentimental; some might even say “Hollywood” inspired so that following all the heartache and so-called realism of the earliest chapters he resorts to a cheap coming together of Patty & Walter which is as unbelievable as the bulk of his writing.

T.S.Eliot

2010-10-26T13:48:00.000Z

By JAMES ZINSMEISTER

The influence of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) on poetry and criticism in the 20th century was immense. His work was so original in terms of style and technique that no less a Modernist icon than Ezra Pound declared that Mr. Eliot had "actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own." While Mr. Eliot's early poems, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), had brought him considerable attention in literary circles, it was "The Waste Land" (1922), a fragmentary and highly allusive verse epic, that gave him his central position in British and American poetry.

Although Mr. Eliot would labor assiduously in several genres, it would be more than 20 years before he completed what critics and poets alike regard as his magnum opus—the exquisite "Four Quartets." Comprising four long poems of five parts each, "Four Quartets" incorporated a number of themes that had been essential to Mr. Eliot's earlier work. However, the length and structure of the poems—combined with a mastery born of maturity and perseverance—enabled Mr. Eliot to address these ideas in greater depth and far more coherently.

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American-English poet and playwright T.S. Eliot

Each of the poems was named after a place that had deep personal significance for Mr. Eliot, who was born in St. Louis, and had spent the first two decades of his life in America before immigrating to England.

"Burnt Norton" (1935) was named after a house and garden on the edge of the Cotswold Hills in southwest England that the poet had once visited, the extraordinary beauty of which had left a lasting impression on him; "East Coker" (1940), after a Somerset village in which the poet's family could trace its lineage to the late 1400s; "The Dry Salvages" (1941), after a group of rocks off the coast of Cape Ann, Mass., that the poet had navigated by as a young sailor summering in the Northeast; and "Little Gidding" (1942), after a humble chapel steeped in history to which the poet, a convert to Anglicanism in 1927, had made a pilgrimage.

But these are more than works of personal reflection. Mr. Eliot called on a vast store of images, symbols and allusions that, deployed in a historical context, enabled the poet to keep his readers' focus on such themes as the redeemability (in the Christian sense) of the individual and the complex relationship between existence, reality and time. Indeed, the setting of the entire work seems to be "the point of intersection of the timeless / With time." ("The Dry Salvages," V, 201-2).

Despite the obvious affinities between the poems, at the outset Mr. Eliot did not plan a series. In answer to a scholar's query, Mr. Eliot wrote: "The idea of the whole sequence emerged gradually, I should say during the composition of 'East Coker.' Certainly 'Burnt Norton' was a solitary experiment, and I had nothing in mind for the next step." In fact, "Burnt Norton" developed out of a dozen or so lines Mr. Eliot had discarded from "Murder in the Cathedral," his verse play about the martyrdom of St. Thomas à Becket.

The end result of more than eight years' work was a sequence of skillfully interwoven poems that correspond with autumn/air, summer/earth, spring/water and winter/fire, respectively. The poems were first published together as "Four Quartets" in America on May 11, 1943, and in England on Oct. 31, 1944.

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A house in East Coker. Mr. Eliot's family could trace its lineage in this Somerset, England, village back to the late 1400s.

While it employs a number of symbols, "Four Quartets" is generally recognized as a "post-Symbolist" work. Helen Gardner, the author of "The Composition of Four Quartets" (1978), the definitive work on the poems, wrote that "literary echoes and allusions are less fundamental as sources than places, times, seasons and, above all, the circumstances in which [the poems] were written." Mr. Eliot himself was quick to point out that a number of the things that were presumed to be "merely" symbolic were in fact based on observations and experiences.

Mr. Eliot tried hard to keep the poetry—even at its most philosophical and abstract—tethered to reality. "We had the experience but missed the meaning" ("The Dry Salvages," II, 93), he wrote. In the end, conveying the precise meaning in "Four Quartets," no matter how difficult an undertaking, was of primary importance to the mature, world-weary Mr. Eliot. Obliquity was acceptable; obscurity was not.

While the poems were intended to be read in the order in which they were composed—and, like suites, "heard" straight through—"Four Quartets" also has a perpendicular quality that enhances its integrity. More than a few scholars and devotees of Eliot's oeuvre have gone to great lengths to convey that certain generalizations can be made regarding the natures and functions of the corresponding sections of the poems. But, in truth, the affinities of the sections to one another can be quite easily apprehended by any close reader of the poems.

Mr. Eliot was modest and reserved. In his early essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), he wrote: "Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know." Since the publication of "Four Quartets," Mr. Eliot has been, in no small measure, that which poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Louise Gluck know or have known.

In recognition of his contributions to poetry, drama and criticism, Thomas Stearns Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He continued to write well into old age (but produced no poetry) and gave numerous public readings in both Europe and America, on several occasions to many thousands.

I came to these poems as a young man, an aspiring poet with little knowledge of either the wide world or the variety and depth of human experience within it. The poems took me immediately and forever to a deep, mysterious and timeless place where insights seemed as plentiful as stars. I'm more than half a century old, and yet their brilliance impresses, informs and inspires me still.

Mr. Eliot died in London on Jan. 4, 1965, and his ashes were interred at the Parish Church of St. Michael in East Coker. Shortly thereafter, a cenotaph honoring him was dedicated at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. It bears the inscription: "The communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living." The lines are from "Little Gidding" (I, 50-1), which Mr. Eliot regarded as the best poem of his best poetical work.

—Mr. Zinsmeister is a freelance writer in New Jersey.

Eva Ibbotson has died...........

2010-10-26T13:43:00.000Z

Tributes to children's author Eva Ibbotson

Oct 26 2010by Andy Hughes, The Journal

NORTH East children’s author Eva Ibbotson, whose fans include US President Barack Obama, has died at the age of 85.

The award-winning writer, known for her amusing and magical tales, passed away at her home in Newcastle on Wednesday.

Industry experts have paid tribute to the writer whose career spanned 35 years.

Born in Vienna, Austria, Mrs Ibbotson and her family moved to the UK in 1933, the year Hitler seized power in Germany.

She moved to the North East in 1960 with her husband, Alan, when he got a lecturing job at King’s College, later Newcastle University. The couple went on to bring up their daughter and three sons in Newcastle.

While working as a teacher in the North East, Mrs Ibbotson began her writing career in 1965 when she penned television drama Linda Came Today. Ten years later, aged 50, she published her first novel, The Great Ghost Rescue. She went on to write 16 children’s novels and seven romance novels for adults.

Her most acclaimed book, adventure story Journey to the River Sea, was published in 2001 and went on to win the Nestlé Children’s Gold Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie medal.

The book, which tells the story of an orphan girl on an adventure to find her distant relatives, was purchased by President Obama in April for his two daughters, Malia, 11, and Sasha, nine, in a shopping centre in Iowa.

At the time, the President said: “I think they’re going to like this.”

After hearing of her new fan, Mrs Ibbotson said: “As you can imagine I was delighted and very surprised to hear that President Obama had bought Journey to the River Sea for his two daughters.

“The question is will they enjoy the story once they have read it? I very much hope so.

“It seems a long journey from Newcastle into the White House, but the story, set in the Amazon, was written for any child who likes adventure. The two little girls, living the fairytale life that they do, must surely come into that category.” Speaking after her death, Dom Kingston, senior publicity manager for Mrs Ibbotson’s publisher, Macmillan Children’s Books, said she will be missed.

He said: “In a career stretching over 35 years, Eva’s novels touched the hearts and souls of generations of children and their parents.

“She wrote with immense wit, economy and elegance – and her deceptively funny, engaging books always pack an emotional punch, whether she was writing for eight-year-olds or young teens.

“Eva’s own fierce intelligence, self-deprecating humour and wonderful quick wittedness are reflected in and will live on through her books.”

Franzen's Freedom - my view..........

2010-10-26T13:39:00.000Z

Image via Wikipedia

Freedom: A novel Review

There has been much in the press and on TV recently about Franzen's "Freedom", enough to fill the pages of many reviews - so what is the fuss all about?

Could it be that the book is a brilliant story with real characters? Perhaps the writing complements the scope of the long narrative? Maybe Franzen has captured the essence of the age and distilled it into memorable fiction? Perhaps this is a book in the long tradition of the Great American Novel and worthy of inclusion?

Sadly none of this is true.

It's certainly not the plot because the plot is all over the place and it's not the writing because his style and quality is uneven and sometimes tedious. There are few memorable lines let alone passages of outstanding language or poetry.

So could it be brilliant because of the characters?

Like Patty Berglund, or like Walter Berglund, her husband or the other main character that drives the essence of the novel, Richard Kratz. Unfortunately not – not anything much in the characterization except caricature. Nothing here that is real. All the characters, main or otherwise, just seem to exist in their own selfish capsules, occasionally brought out to mix and seemingly influence each other. But I always felt they were talking and engaging with themselves - little dialogues in their own heads, sex in their own heads, ordinariness made special in their own heads.

As I read through the novel I felt confronted by set pieces, cardboard characters, the politics of the author neatly parceled for understanding. None of these things did I expect of the author of "Corrections". I felt too often Franzen was indulging himself and his audience. This was a man trying to write a best seller. And it's a particular kind of best-seller - it has to be cool. Everything that is good in Franzen's world is about "coolness". The way people dress, their music, their jobs all reflect being cool.

Well he'll make a "cool" few million from the book but it's the nearest he'll get to greatness. His followers will not universally like this book. Take for example the ending - The ending is tacky, sentimental; some might even say "Hollywood" inspired so that following all the heartache and so-called realism of the earliest chapters he resorts to a cheap coming together of Patty & Walter which is as unbelievable, as the bulk of his writing.

Jonathan Franzen......

2010-10-26T12:30:00.002Z

I've now read Franzen's Freedom and find much in it that is marvellous and admirable BUT and its a big BUT......there are flaws........

Franzen & Freedom

2010-10-26T12:29:00.000Z

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Harper Collins, $38.99

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Photo / Supplied.

Meet Patty and Walter Berglund. At first glance, they seem like the archetypal American family, firmly rooted in Midwest suburbia, content and happy with their renovations, cupcakes and child rearing.

But first impressions can be deceiving, and Jonathan Franzen is a writer with a keen eye for lifting stones and revealing the fractures and fault lines that lie beneath modern life.

Freedom is a marathon story of familial dysfunction and white, middle-class malaise. As in his award-winning novel The Corrections, Franzen takes a somewhat sardonic view of life in the suburbs and the struggle for freedom that occurs within relationships, the community and the world.

He writes of the Berglund's slowly unravelling marriage in such a way as to make you feel that the characters are insects, caught squirming under the unrelenting gaze of his microscope.

The scenes are intensely examined and the descriptions are densely packed - nothing escapes his eagle eye.

Although Freedom is sharply focused on the Berglunds, there are several other threads of narrative weaving through the story: Patty and Walter's son, Joey, and his attempts to find his place in the world, Walter's alternative rock star best friend who is a catalyst to the breakdown of the marriage, and a larger dystopian view of environmental issues and the dangers of population growth.

There's a lot to take in, so it's no wonder this book weighs in at a hefty 562 pages -Freedom has the sheer physicality of an epic novel.

There's no doubt that Franzen has a special talent for turning the mediocre into compelling writing. There is nothing special about his characters, and this is where his gift is evident. Franzen doesn't shy away from recording every nuance of everyday life and does it in a remarkably unsympathetic way.

His writing is strangely remote and this serves to make the reader feel as if they're witnessing a situation rather than experiencing it.

I find this technique makes it difficult to immerse you fully in the story and stops the reader from engaging with the characters on an emotionally satisfying level. The prose is sometimes clunky and in any other writer this would be taken as a flaw. However, because it's Franzen, it can be overlooked as "style".

Given the hype surrounding this book, I would have expected some breathtaking passages and characterisation, but ultimately I was disappointed. Though the main female character of Patty is well drawn, the other women in the book are unrecognisable to me.

In particular, the character of Connie gives a whole new meaning to the term "doormat".

"You don't have to love me," she says at one point. "I can just love you."

Perhaps this is Franzen's humour. He's described Freedom as: "A comedy about a family in crisis", and although there are funny moments in the book, they verge more on tragicomedy than actual humour.

But the real question hanging over this book is whether it's the "great American novel".

So is it? Well, kind of, depending on who you talk to. The expectation surrounding this release has been enormous. Time magazine recently crowned Franzen as the "King of American Letters" and the debate surrounding the literary merit of the book has raged on message boards across the world.

I think it's another modern interpretation of a well-worn genre. The narrative is strong and it forces you to keep reading. It's entertaining and, despite its faults, compelling.

However, given all the hype, I couldn't help but feel that there is a touch of The Emperor's New Clothes about this offering and that perhaps it's really middle-of-the road, middle-of- the-suburbs angst dressed up as a literary marvel.

By Zara Potts

Shen Yun

2010-01-07T15:52:00.000Z

Writer Sees in Shen Yun ‘a message of tolerance and peace’

By Diana Hubert
Epoch Times StaffCreated: Jan 2, 2010Last Updated: Jan 3, 2010

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Related articles: Arts & Entertainment > Arts & Entertainment

Matthew and Vivee Francis Olzmann (Jing Zuo/The Epoch Times)

DETROIT—The Shen Yun Performing Arts International Company’s show at Detroit Opera House on Saturday depicted the excellence of Chinese classical dance. The show included songs sung in Chinese with English subtitles whose meaning transcended the spoken and written word.

Two writers of Western prose and poetry, Matthew Olzmann and Vivee Francis Olzmann, spoke about the show’s effect on them.

“I’m really enjoying it. It’s very moving and very beautiful; so intricate, the movements are so intricate,” said Vivee, who is a teacher as well as a poet.

“The family scene with the little girl and the mother dying—that made me weepy,” she said.

Vivee was referring to Nothing Can Block the Divine Path. The program description for this piece states: “Mother and daughter who perform Falun Dafa exercises in a park are discovered by police … The mother is dragged to a detention center where she pays the ultimate price for trying to protect her daughter.”

Vivee said it was her understanding that such things are happening in China today. ”I think it’s saying that everyone should be allowed to practice their spirituality as they will. So that’s the message I got—freedom of practice.”

Matthew, who is a novelist and teacher, thought the show was “amazing—very visually stunning and very beautiful—a message of tolerance and peace. The whole performance is very beautiful, especially the Tibetan Dance of Praise.”

In this piece, the performers wear the garb of traditional Tibetan nobility as young men and women share their joy of life in Tibet’s snowy mountains.

“Dance in Tibet—harmonious in form and energy—is as much a part of daily life as herding, hunting, or devotional prayers,” the program says.

The couple would definitely plan to come again, Vivee said, and she will share her experience with her family and friends.

Shen Yun Performing Arts has three companies touring the world. The International Company will perform one more show at the Detroit Opera House: Sunday, Jan. 3 at 4:00 pm.

The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of Shen Yun Performing Arts. For more information, please visitShenYunPerformingArts.org

Poem of the Day

2010-01-07T15:41:00.000Z

My poem for today......

Merry Xmas

2009-12-25T09:25:00.002Z

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Merry Xmas

Xi Chuan and the idea of self

2009-12-23T16:15:00.000Z

Visiting poet shares Chinese experiences

JOSH THOMPSON

Chinese poet Xi Chuan was the Orion Visiting Lecturer this semester.

Dec 02, 2009 11:31 PM

Will Johnson

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.

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

2009-12-23T16:09:00.001Z

Image via Wikipedia

The year 2009 has been a good year for fiction of all kinds. Here is a selection of the best..........

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

Snowy White for Xmas

2009-12-23T16:03:00.000Z

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.

Aamir Khan

2009-12-23T15:57:00.000Z

Bollywood looks to Aamir Khan to end 2009 on a high

By Shail Kumar Singh (AFP) – 11 hours ago

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."

Poetry in 2009

2009-12-15T14:09:00.000Z

Image by chrisjohnbeckett via Flickr

This year, 2009 has been remarkable in the number of new poetry books published.

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

2009-12-15T14:05:00.000Z

Cover of The Savage Detectives: A Novel

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.

Sylvia Plath

2009-12-06T12:01:00.000Z

Image by vintagecat via Flickr

Fiction & Nurturing Souls!!!

2009-03-10T14:22:00.000Z

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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Rebecca puts Birmingham on the map.....

2009-03-10T14:19:00.001Z

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.

Comment Central - Times Online - WBLG: Disturbing fallout of the Rushdie fatwa

2009-02-10T15:50:00.000Z

Comment Central - Times Online - WBLG: Disturbing fallout of the Rushdie fatwa

John Updike ~ A man for all seasons.....

2009-02-01T15:12:00.001Z

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!

2009-02-01T15:05:00.001Z

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:

Gordon Brown & Nixon!

2009-01-19T16:08:00.000Z

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

2008-11-23T14:24:00.000Z

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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//

2008-10-06T09:26:00.000Z

2008-08-09T15:34:00.001+01:00

Beijing ~ Where it Sizzles!!

2008-08-04T15:22:00.000+01:00

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.

BBC NEWS | Business | UK house prices 'fell 2% in June'

2008-07-10T11:22:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS Business UK house prices 'fell 2% in June'

Very Funny Animated Gifs Part 511

2008-07-07T18:42:00.001+01:00

Writing a review

2008-06-22T19:25:00.001+01:00

How to Write a Review

by Gale Barker, Jun 21, 2008

Are you mad about movies? Do you love to read the latest books? Do you have a season ticket for concerts or the ballet?

Do your market research. Study the publications you want to write for, which reviews they include, and the style, tone, and format of the reviews.

Make sure you have all the relevant pieces of information to identify what you are reviewing. Mention them at the beginning e.g. if it is a play, you will need the name of the play, the playwright, the theatre where it is being performed, and the dates that it is on. (But sometimes some of this information is given at the foot of the review.)
If it is a television programme, you will need the title, the television channel it was shown on, and the date and time of transmission. Tailor this information to the conventions normally used by your target publication.
How to Write Your Review
Begin by mentioning what you are reviewing without making it sound like the introduction to a school presentation: “I am reviewing Coronation Street which was on ITV on Friday 29th February at 7.30 p.m.”
See what sort of techniques the usual reviewers use. Try to incorporate the information in an attention-grabbing hook.
Adopt a tone that's suited to the publication you are aiming for - serious, flippant, humorous, witty - and make your review a similar length to ones which the publication usually prints.
Make Your Review Readable
Give enough detail to give your reader a brief idea of the content, without reproducing the entire show/play/book/ exhibition.
Give the review an angle - let the reader see why you chose to review this particular thing. Is it because it was terrible, shocking, exciting, original, unforgettable or exceptionally good? Give as much of your own personal response as the publication normally allows.
Illustrate any claims you make with examples, but remember you are aiming to inform, entertain and be thought-provoking. This is not a school or university essay!
Use original, striking language, and avoid clichés. Don't “state the obvious” or you'll turn your readers off straight away.
Make sure your spelling, grammar, and presentation are immaculate.
Give it a Proper Ending
End with a sentence summarising your conclusion - was the subject of the review worth watching/visiting/buying? Did it have certain strengths, but fall short in some way? Try to end your piece with a memorable phrase.

Ian McEwan

2008-06-22T13:35:00.003+01:00

Ian McEwan: I despise militant Islam

By Nicole Martin, Digital and Media Correspondent
Last Updated: 1:16PM BST 22/06/2008

The award-winning novelist Ian McEwan has launched an outspoken attack on militant Islam, accusing it of "wanting to create a society that I detest".

Ian McEwan has been criticised by the Muslim Council of Britain
The author said he "despises Islamism" because of its views on women and homosexuality.
But predicting a backlash against his comments, which were made in an Italian newspaper, he insisted he was not a racist.

The writer of Atonement and Enduring Love condemned religious hardliners as he defended his friend, the writer Martin Amis, against charges of racism.
Article continues
Amis was accused last year of being Islamaphobic after he said that "the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order".
In an essay written the day before the fifth anniversary of the bombing of New York's Twin Towers, the novelist suggested "strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan", preventing Muslims from travelling, and further down the road, deportation.
In The Age of Horrorism, Amis argued that fundamentalists had won the battle between Islam and Islamism.

McEwan, 60, said it was "logically absurd and morally unacceptable" that writers who speak out against militant Islam are immediately branded racist.

"As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark-skinned, he who criticises it is racist," he said in an interview in Corriere della Sera.

"This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on - we know it well."
McEwan recognised that similar views were held by some Christian hardliners in America.
"I find them equally absurd," he said. "I don't like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others. But those American Christians don't want to kill anyone in my city, that's the difference."

Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, criticised McEwan's defence of Amis.

"Mr McEwan is being rather disingenuous about his friend, Martin Amis's remarks. Of course you should be allowed to criticise the tenets of any religion. However, Amis went much further than that," he said.

"He was advocating that the Muslim community be made to suffer 'until it gets its own house in order'. And what sort of suffering did Amis have in mind? In his own words, 'Not letting them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.'"

He added: "Those were clearly very bigoted remarks and the fact that McEwan prefers to whitewash them tells us much about his own views too."

Houses ~ Falls much bigger!!

2008-06-11T10:47:00.000+01:00

'House prices to fall until 2010': the options for buyers and sellers
Last Updated: 12:56am BST 11/06/2008
Page 1 of 2
Have your say Read comments
Homeowners are being warned to brace themselves for three years of falling house prices, writes Paul Farrow
There are signs that tens of thousands of borrowers are already being sucked into negative equity.
Ed Stansfield, at Capital Economics, said: "We had forecast price falls of 8 per cent this year and 10 per cent next year, but the 8 per cent figure is looking very conservative. It is now plausible that prices will fall by 15 per cent in 2008. When it comes to forecasting the direction of prices in 2010 it is a case of reasoning why prices won't fall further rather than the other way around. House prices falls tend to run in years not months."
Mortgage repossessions: how to hang on to your home
Ten tips to get the best price when you sell your home
Surviving negative equity
The gloomy prediction comes as the number of homeowners in danger of falling into negative equity begins to rise. More than 23,000 homeowners took out 100 per cent home loans in the past year – and it is highly likely they are already in negative territory.
Weighed down: homeowners need to be prepared for difficult times in the housing market
The number of houses changing hands has also "collapsed" to the lowest level in 30 years. The fall in sales far exceeds the depths of the last housing crash in the 1990s and is the lowest since records began in 1978. The average number of houses that estate agents sold in the past three months was 17.4 - almost a third lower than a year ago, says the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).
Miles Shipside at Rightmove said that those that were still looking to sell were being totally unrealistic – new asking prices were, on average still higher than a year ago. "Sellers have to drop their asking price by at least 10 per cent," he said.
Last month, Hometrack, the property research company said that property values had fallen eight months in a row, while Nationwide and Halifax, the two largest mortgage lenders, confirmed that house prices are falling year-on-year.
House sales fall is steepest since the 1970s, says RICS
House prices: News, views and data
RICS UK housing market survey, May 2008 [PDF Format]
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We have canvassed the thoughts of some other leading experts on how far they see prices falling – and what they would do if they were a buyer or a seller during these difficult times.
How far can prices fall and has your forecast changed recently given the ongoing gloom and fall in consumer confidence?
Alun Powell, senior UK economist, HSBC "The recent run of weak housing market statistics, including the very low levels of mortgage approvals for house purchase and falling house prices, has led us to downgrade our forecasts for house price inflation. We now expect that by the end of this year, prices will be 10 per cent lower than they were at the end of 2007. The bigger question is what will happen to house prices in 2009. Our view is that a weakening economy will keep the housing market subdued."
Melanie Bien, director Savills Private Finance "The UK mainstream market will fall 8 per cent this year and 2 per cent in 2009 assuming liquidity pressures ease by the end of the year. The worst case scenario is a 10 per cent fall in average values in 2008 and a further 15 per cent in 2009 taking values back to 2004 levels for UK residential."
Ray Boulger, analyst at John Charcol, the mortgage broker "I have changed a little. I expect prices to fall by about 9 per cent this year but to be recovering by the second half of next year."
Marc Goldberg, head of residential sales, Hamptons International "We have seen prices fall by around 10-15 per cent so far, since the peak of 2007 and it is possible we will see another 5 per cent over the next few months – which will mean a 20 per cent drop since summer 2007."
What would you do if you were a buyer?
Melanie Bien: "If I were a buyer I would find a property I liked and then seriously haggle on the asking price. It's important in a housing market downturn that you don't pay more than you need to, nor overstretch yourself on the mortgage.
"If I were a buyer without a deposit of at least 5 per cent (preferably) or 10 per cent and no likelihood of assistance I would return to old-fashioned values and save for one. Because there is a downturn you won't risk being priced off the ladder while you save and it will widen your options, give you access to a greater number of mortgages at preferential rates."
Mark Goldberg: "Analyse prices carefully. Prices are 15 per cent off the peak of last summer and some vendors have taken advice from their agent on this and adjusted prices accordingly. However, others have ignored the recent changes in the market.
"Ask the agent why the vendor is moving. There are always people moving for genuine reasons and these people are more likely to be realistic than those just looking to cash in on an investment. It is a more relaxed proposition buying in a down-turn though, as buyers can, on the whole, secure the price they want."
Have your say
Continued
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2008-06-10T16:35:00.002+01:00

Dialect researchers given a 'canny load of chink' to sort 'pikeys' from 'chavs' in regional accents
By Andy McSmithFriday, 1 June 2007

If, in this age of instant nationwide communication, you think that regional dialects have died off in the UK, you must be a bit of a noggerhead (as they say in Somerset), or perhaps or a nizgul (from the Black Country), or you're a bit cakey (Staffordshire), or batchy (Essex), mazed (Devon and Somerset), niddy-noddy (Isle of Man), or just gormless (Yorkshire).
Researchers at Leeds University are sifting through a vast collection of examples of regional slang words and phrases turned up by a project run by the BBC, in which they invited the public to send in examples of English still spoken throughout the country.
So much information came back that the Arts and Humanities Research Council has awarded a team led by Sally Johnson, Professor of Linguistics and Phonetics at Leeds University, £460,000 to study it. Among thousands of items turned up by the BBC Voices project is the range of words the young use to insult one another.

How, for instance, do they describe someone who goes around dressed in a lot of cheap, trendy clothes and jewellery, someone like the singer Lily Allen, for example? The best-known insult thrown at such a person is "chav", which can be heard all across the south of England and has spread north.

But in the South-east, such a person may also be called a "pikey", a corruption of 'turnpike sailor', a derogatory name that used to be directed at gypsies.

Other regional insults, all given the same meaning, include "charva", a Romany word heard in Newcastle, "scally" on Merseyside, "ned" in southern Scotland, and "kev" - short for Kevin - around Birmingham.

One of Lily Allen's offences against sartorial standards was to be photographed in a dress and trainers - trainers as the universal word for footwear known as "pumps" in Yorkshire, "gutties" in Scotland, and "daps" if you're on the south coast. "These labels are perhaps more eloquent of the people who are using them, and their attitudes, than of the people they try to stick these labels on," Clive Upton, a member of the research team, said.
"There is a study to be done as to whether when somebody calls someone else a 'pikey' or a 'scally', the word means the same to the hearer as to the person using it. Some people might think of it as a style statement, others might hear something threatening.

"But while we are in academia studying these questions, the people who really know what is going on and the people who are really driving the language forward are the people who speak it."
Mr Upton, who is Professor of English at Leeds University, said that they were "very pleased" - and indeed, "well chuffed" - at receiving their generous grant. He could, of course, have been "bostin" if he had come from the Black Country, or if he was a Scouser he would have been well "made up" over so many spondoolicks, because as a Geordie might say, £460,000 is a "canny load of chink"

The word on the street: dialects from around Britain

Northern Ireland
Foundered: cold, chilled
Hirple: hobble or walk with a limp or unevenly
Peasewisp: untidy heap
Scrake of dawn: very early
Yam: crying sound of a cat

Glasgow
Go-carry: piggy-back
Midgie men: bin men
Oaxter: armpit
Planked: hidden

Tyneside
Canny: something or someone good
Copper wife: policewoman
Hadaway/Howay: be gone
Snotter cloot: handkerchief
Wor: our

Liverpool
Backie: riding on the back of someone's bike
Delf: cups, saucers, plates
Exey cosher: newspaper street seller
Latchlifter: having enough money to go to the pub
Spondoolicks: money

Yorkshire
Ay oop/Ey oop: hello
Baht: without
Clarty: muddy
Happen, or 'appen: perhaps
Owt: anything
Black Country
Mardy: moody
Nizgul: stupid person
Ronk: horrible
Toy: a gentleman's neck tie

London
Russell Harty: party
North and South: mouth
Pete Tong: wrong
Leo Sayer: all dayer
Tom Cruise: booze
Boracic lint: skint
Lord Mayor: swear

Southern Counties
Allus: always
Bodger: careless worker
Swimey: sick, or faint
Twitten: narrow path or lane

Edinburgh
Gie's a schifter: let me have a go/look
Mawkit: dirty
Pure: solid, really difficult
Top gadgie: great guy
Somerset
Acker: friend
Lart: wooden flooring
Noggerhead: idiot
Pixie-led: simple minded or crazed
Scollared: taught

Mid-Wales
Chimook: chimney
Glat: hole in the hedge
Her's in a cank!: she is in a bad mood
Unty tump: mole hill

Wiltshire
Fuckling: tiresome
Galley-bagger: scarecrow
Loppity: to feel weak or out of sorts
Mucker a miser: Teg sheep

Norfolk
Bishy-barney-bee: ladybird
Dodman snail: Mawkin scarecrow

Another Pikey joke.......

2008-06-10T16:31:00.001+01:00

Did you hear about the pikey who won the lottery?Apparently they're going to pay him with Travellers Cheques...

Gordon Brown ~ Good news and Bad news for Porridge

2008-06-08T19:02:00.001+01:00

The good news, according to the Politics Home website, is that Brown’s unpopularity has finally “bottomed out”.

The bad news is that his approval ratings have flatlined, with 77% thinking he is doing a bad job.

At prime minister’s questions, he looked more miserable and lonely than ever. The talk among Labour MPs is doom-laden.

Could he have gone by Xmas?

Gordon Porridge ~ record breaker

2008-06-08T18:57:00.001+01:00

Gordon Brown is breaking all the wrong kind of records.

Only John Major has hit a lower poll rating in office than Brown today. A recovery from here would make history.

With the first anniversary of his premiership still not upon us, Gordon Brown has set an unenviable record. He leads the most unpopular Labour government in polling history.
Jim Callaghan, in the Seventies, never fell below 30 per cent in the Gallup polls of his day. Harold Wilson's nadir was 28 per cent in 1968. Mr Brown's government is supported by just 26 per cent.
Only John Major, who slipped below 20 per cent, stands between Mr Brown and the wooden spoon for most unpopular government. It is hardly a comforting thought.

Gordon Porridge is full of oats

2008-06-08T18:55:00.000+01:00

June 8 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labour Party reached a record low in popularity ratings, a poll found, although the same survey showed public backing for his counter-terror proposals, a key government policy that faces a vote in Parliament this week.
An ICM Ltd. poll for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper published today gave the main opposition Conservative party a popularity ranking of 42 percent, while Labour scored 26 percent -- the lowest recorded rating for the party by the polling company. ICM interviewed 1,023 adults on June 4 and 5 and no margin of error was given.

Irish to vote NO NO NO NO YES

2008-06-08T18:51:00.000+01:00

No camp 'gains' in Irish EU vote

Irish No campaigners seem to have gained ground
Irish and EU officials say they are confident the EU reform treaty will pass an Irish referendum despite a poll suggesting the No vote is surging.
A survey published by the Irish Times on Friday suggested 35% of people would vote No - more than twice the figure polled two weeks ago - against 30% Yes.
It is the first poll to put the Nos in the lead, ahead of Thursday's vote.
Ireland is the only country holding a referendum on the treaty. A No vote would throw the process into chaos.

Carol's Birthday on 30th May 2008

2008-06-08T15:03:00.001+01:00

Tories surge ahead in polls

2008-06-03T14:27:00.000+01:00

The Conservative Party enjoys a 14-point lead over Labour, enough to give David Cameron an overall majority of 102, according to the latest poll by ComRes for The Independent.
It puts the Tories on 44 per cent, their highest rating since the company began polling for this newspaper in October 2006.
Labour is on 30 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 16 per cent.
Although Tory support has risen four points since our last ComRes survey five weeks ago, their lead over Labour remains the same because Labour is also up four points. Other parties appear to have been squeezed. The Liberal Democrats have dropped four points, and the smaller parties have fallen back by the same amount.

Modern Jazz Quartet - Django

2008-06-02T15:43:00.001+01:00

Incredible group from my youth.

Xmas is coming

2008-05-27T10:21:00.000Z

Homeowners will lose £20,000 by next Christmas as house prices drop 10%
By SEAN POULTER
Last updated at 23:14 31 December 2007

Glimpse of the future: A slump in the housing market is indicated after ten years during which prices have doubled
An average of £20,000 will be wiped off the value of every home by next Christmas, it is claimed today.

This will be the effect of a 10 per cent fall in property prices compared with their peak in August, say analysts.

In total, this equates to a staggering £400billion fall in the bricks and mortar wealth of the nation.

The figures come from accountants at Grant Thornton, who warn the reverse is likely to deliver a huge blow to consumer confidence and, potentially, the wider economy.

House prices have more than doubled in the last ten years, creating a feeling of economic well-being and security that generated a consumer spending boom.

This boom, built on credit, kept high-street stores busy, promoted manufacturing orders and ensured the UK avoided recession.

Grant Thornton warns that a fall in house prices could have exactly the opposite effect. Homeowners will feel poorer, leading them to tighten their belts and limit their spending which could starve stores of income, threatening closures and job losses.

Senior tax partner at Grant Thornton, Maurice Fitzpatrick, said: "It appears that house prices hit their peak in August. We can expect a fall of 3 per cent by the end of 2007, followed by a further fall of 7 per cent in 2008.

"This would wipe £400billion off the value of UK residential property or an average of £20,000 per household.

"A 'burn off' of this degree of personal wealth would tend to make people more cautious about borrowing. That would damage any feelgood factor and, potentially, economic growth."

He added: "The value of a person's home is crucial in terms of the psychology of personal and financial well-being. Just as rising property prices promoted a feelgood factor and spending, so falls could have a powerful opposite effect."

Mr Fitzpatrick said his projections represent an analysis of the figures based on the "best available hard evidence".

The Bank of England's decision to cut the base rate by a quarter point in December to 5.5 per cent was intended to head off the worst effects of the credit crunch. However, City analysts believe that this falls well short of having any meaningful effect.

Many banks and building societies have refused to pass on the cut to borrowers. At the same time, they have slashed the number of mortgages they are offering, leading to a fall in the number of property sales and prices.

Experts at Capital Economics revised their forecasts to suggest price falls over the next two years will be greater than it originally anticipated.

They believe prices will fall by an average of 5 per cent in 2008 and 8 per cent in 2009, wiping out all the increases of the last 18 months.

Previously, it had forecast a fall of 3 per cent in each of these two years.

However, price falls could turn out to be good news for firsttime buyers. Chief economist at the Halifax, Martin Ellis, said: "A more subdued housing market over the next few years is a positive step for potential new entrants."

Business leaders also warned that the property market could suffer a "sharp reversal" in 2008.

Confederation of British Industry director-general Richard Lambert warned that "a sharp reversal" in house prices would have serious consequences but added that there was a risk excessively gloomy talk could fuel a deeper downturn than need take place.

CML distorts info on the housing market!!

2008-05-27T09:58:00.000Z

The Council of Mortgage Lender (CML) revised their forecast for UK House prices for 2008 from an anticipated rise of 1% as of Oct 07 to now project a fall in prices of 7%. The CML, inline with its member institutions has a vested interest in talking up the housing market as evidenced by the inaccuracy of their housing market forecasts during periods of falling house prices.

As a reminder to readers, the Market Oracle forecast for UK house prices made ahead of the actual peak in the housing market in August 2007 is for a 15% drop over 2 years from August 2007 to August 2009, therefore forecasting a 7% to 7.5% drop for the year 2008.

UK house prices (as measured by the Halifax NSA data) have fallen by 2.2% so far during 2008. Therefore it appears that the CML having proved inept at providing an accurate house price forecast and now appear to have taken the safe route of extrapolating and rounding the price trend this year to the end of 2008 i.e. 2.2% X3 = 6.6% rounded up to 7%. Similarly the Royal Institute of Surveyors (RICS) have revised their forecast lower for 2008 from unchanged to now project a 5% fall.

The article Media Lessons from 1989! presented headlines from the last housing bear market of how forecasts issued by the institutions with a vested interest in the mortgage market, that were lapped up by the mainstream media tended to be grossly inaccurate against the actual outcome. Which is why even as recently as March of this year, many of the chief economist's of the big mortgage providers were still talking up the prospects for the UK housing market suggesting house prices would not fall this year i.e. Britains biggest mortgage bank, the Halifax gave a positive spin on UK House prices in March 08, - "strong underlying fundamentals will continue to support the market throughout 2008". "Over the past year, the average price of a home in the UK has increased by £4,390 to £196,649," he commented. "Whilst the housing market has slowed over the past six months, it is supported by sound economic fundamentals. Interest rate cuts by the Bank of England are also helping to underpin house prices,".

The UK Housing market remains closely on track to fulfil the 2 year forecast for a 15% real terms decline. Beyond August 2009, preliminary analysis suggests that the housing market will continue to be weak with no prospects of real-term gains.

House Prices and Crude Oil Fuelled Stagflation

Crude oil hitting $135 shows signs of the stagflationary environment that the world is entering. Despite the short-term overbought state, crude oil looks set to continue its inexorable trend towards $200 and then beyond, doubling every few years as unrelenting emerging markets demand chases Peak Oil capped supply. The analysis posted just 2 days ago ( Oil Crisis Stagflation Spiral Special ) explained why crude oil fuelled stagflation is going to be with us for many years and warned of a possible imminent price spike from the then $127 to beyond $140, with crude now at above $134 the price spike is well under way.

The consequences of stagflation for the UK housing market is for a rise in even the flawed official CPI inflation measure. The real rate of inflation for the UK is probably at RPI +1% and therefore 5.2%. Under such an increasingly inflationary environment it is difficult for nominal house prices to fall much beyond the forecast 15%, as each year house prices are losing an additional inflation adjusted value of 5% therefore over a 3 year period that may see UK house prices fall by say 18% in nominal-terms, when adjusted for 5% inflation this would imply a real-terms fall of in-excess of 33%.

Therefore the rate of real inflation will be a key factor in the construction of the housing market forecast for the period post August 2009 as inflation will erode the value of house prices for many more years, even if there is little change in house prices in nominal terms.

More Analysis of the UK Housing Market:

08 May 2008 - UK House Prices Tumbling- Interest Rate Conundrum
21 Apr 2008 - Bank of England Throws £50 billion of Tax Payers Money at the Banks
17 Apr 2008 - Credit Crisis SCOOP- LIBOR Is Now Irrelevant to Derivatives Pricing
08 Apr 2008 - UK House Prices Plunge Over the Cliff
01 Apr 2008 - How to Fix the Credit Markets
11 Mar 2008 - RICS Data Confirms UK Housing Market Heading for 1990's Style Crash
03 Mar 2008 - Credit Crisis Morphs Into Stagflation- Protect Your Wealth!
26 Feb 2008 - UK House Prices Fall for 5 Months in a Row- Housing Market Will Go Negative April 08
07 Feb 2008 - UK Interest Rates Cut to 5.25% - Will Not Help the Housing Market
21 Dec 2007 - UK Commercial Properties Crash Looms as Property Investment Fund Frozen
07 Dec 2007 - Analysis of Interbank and Base Interest Rate Spread
05 Dec 2007 - UK Home Owners Unable to Refinance Mortgages As Fixed Rates Expire During 2008
02 Dec 2007 - UK Housing Slump Gains Momentum as Properties Fail to Sell at Auction
10th Nov 2007 - Crash in UK House Prices Forecast for April 2008 As Buy to Let Investors Sell on Capital Gains Tax Change
28th Oct 07 - UK House Prices - Primary Reasons For a Sharp Fall
25th Sep 07 - UK Housing Market on Brink of Price Crash - Media Lessons from 1989!
22nd Aug 07 - UK Housing Market Crash of 2007 - 2008 and Steps to Protect Your Wealth
1st May 07 - UK Housing Market Heading for a Property Crash

By Nadeem Walayat

Copyright © 2005-08 Marketoracle.co.uk (Market Oracle Ltd). All rights reserved.

Gordon Porridge ~ PM of UK

2008-04-17T17:24:00.001Z

PM is like porridge - Labour peer

Mr Brown's leadership style was likened to porridge

A Labour peer has launched an attack on Gordon Brown's premiership saying it was like "porridge" compared with predecessor Tony Blair's "champagne".

Lord Desai said Mr Brown must "change his style" to be "more presentable".
He told the BBC recent opinion polls did not look good for Labour, ahead of local elections next month, but said it could "overcome these things."
Lord Desai, a leading economist, is not known to have spoken out against the party leadership before.

'Not exciting'

He told BBC News 24: "A lot of this is about perception. He [Mr Brown] doesn't seem to be able to tell people he's on their side and he can solve their problems.
"I really think somebody has to change his style and make him more presentable."
Gordon Brown was put on earth to remind people how good Tony Blair was
Lord Desai
Lord Desai added: "He is a tremendous person in terms of thinking, policymaking, his seriousness, the question is going to convey to people that he feels their pain and that he is on their side?"
He said that as a Labour member for 37 years, his main concern was the party won the next election, but he believed voters were losing patience with Mr Brown's style of government.
"Blair was like champagne and caviar, Brown is more like porridge or Haggis. He is very solid, very nourishing but not exciting," he said.
'Weak'
The backbench peer denied he was stabbing the prime minister in the back, while he was out of the country on a tour of the US.
"I am not stabbing him at all, but if it was it would be in the front. I have said something openly, frankly," he told BBC News 24.
"Tony Blair had a style of communication and that's why, when you see Gordon Brown, you say 'Oh my God, how good Tony Blair was'," he added.
Earlier, he told the Evening Standard newspaper that the prime minister had appeared "indecisive" and "weak" and was "a worrier".
He said: "Gordon Brown was put on earth to remind people how good Tony Blair was."
Lord Desai, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics, is not known to have spoken out against the Labour leadership before
'Miscalculation'
In his interview, he criticised Mr Brown's decision, while chancellor, to abolish the 10p starting rate of income tax - which opponents say will hit low-earners - calling it a "miscalculation".
Lord Desai said the 1 May elections for councils in England and Wales and the London Assembly and mayoralty were "going to be bad" for Labour.
He added: "If Labour loses in London there will be a real climate of fear... it would be absolutely traumatic for the party. At that point, backbenchers would look at the situation and say, 'How is all this going to work out for me?'. There would be real panic stations."
Lord Desai said Foreign Secretary David Miliband would be the best choice as next Labour leader and called Schools Secretary Ed Balls, a close ally of Mr Brown, a "repetition" of the prime minister.
On Wednesday, Chancellor Alistair Darling said the government had to "sharpen ourselves up" and deliver a "clear message of what we are about".
But Health Secretary Alan Johnson called Mr Brown "a serious man for serious times".

Zimbabwe puts DJ before election results

2008-04-16T18:20:00.000Z

Zimbabwe: DJ Features Poetry On Radio
Published by the government of Zimbabwe

Email This Page Print This Page Comment on this article
The Herald (Harare)
31 March 2008Posted to the web 31 March 2008
Harare
POWER FM's Munyaradzi Mlimo is on a mission to bring poetry on the mainstream through his radio programme where he features a diverse line-up of Zimbabwean poets.
The programme -- a first of its kind -- has caught the attention of the station's youthful listeners every Tuesday between 1pm and 1:30pm when Mlimo popularly known as Dj Munya goes out in search of untapped talent.
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Of course, there is a thin line between hip-hop and poetry but on the programme, listeners get to sample poetry in its raw form.
And Dj Munya believes poetry, like hip-hop, is a powerful medium of expression but one, which needs exposure.
"Hip-hop, some call it street poetry or the art of spoken word but unlike any other music genre it lacks exposure.
"So we are trying to put it on the limelight and if we get sponsorship that would be great because that way we should be able to promote poetry throughout the continent.
"Once you get sponsorship it is easy to run the project but right now it is just a platform for untapped talent.
"The talent is there although at first I had my own reservations but I am glad Black Heat, an artist (Nancy Mukondyo) indicated to me that it was something new and exciting," he said.
Dj Munya said through his programme, he hoped to provide a platform for a wider crossover audiences.
"We try and provide a platform for poets from different parts of the country so that they get the exposure and if possible link them with other international poets.
"Initially, it was Black Heat who used to come on the programme every Tuesday but then we realised there was so much enthusiasm from listeners and that's when we decided to have different poets coming on the programme," Dj Munya said.
Later, he said, we incorporated music instruments such as mbira and guitars to create a variation of sounds.
"The format of the programme is simple other poets prefer to recite their poems with music playing in the background and others like to present it without any music," he said.
He said it was encouraging that local poets were as good as international poets.
"I have a lot of faith in our poets because they have depth and are well versed with many issues.
"Some listeners email their poets and it not just reef rough it something that makes you think and appreciate," Dj Munya said.
So far, he has featured poets who include 40-50th, Kadizha Mutekateka and Albert Nyathi is expected to take part.
Besides poetry, Dj Munya has also included book and movie reviews on the programme.
"I have another programme called Unsigned Hype where I feature hip-hop artistes as well as inviting mix-tapes from either club Djs or those who are into music production to sample their stuff.
"I play whatever mix-tape I have and have an interview with the Dj of that mix-tape for about 20 minutes. As for the book reviews I usually get emails from listeners who want a particular book to be reviewed or I pick any book that I feel readers would be interested in.
"The book can be fiction, comedy or anything and possibly tell readers where to find the books," he said.
This, he said, had never been done before on radio but was a deliberate attempt to feature it on the station.
"The same goes for movie reviews where at least we feature the latest movies and see if it's a remake or new film. We get to tell listeners whether it is up to scratch or not," he said.
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He said there was special emphasis on hip-hop since it was one of the hardest hit genres in term of sales. He said with exposure, hip-hop artistes could eke out a living from their works.
"Artistes should be able to put food on their tables from whatever they do. And my wish is to see local hip-hop artistes breaking through the world market so that they too, can eat.
"I know there are hip-hop pioneers in the United States but we have our own here as there many in other countries," he said.

Arab Success

2008-04-16T18:16:00.000Z

Arab literature steals show at London Book Fair
5 hours ago

LONDON (AFP) — Arabic writers were thrust into the spotlight at the London Book Fair this week, as the British capital's annual festival showcased the literary talents of the Arab World.
In its 37th edition the publishing professionals' fair invited 22 countries and territories where Arabic is the official language to present their own particular forms of literature.
Organisers at the fair, which drew to a close Wednesday, insisted that the fact that the Paris Book Fair honoured Israeli writers last month was purely a coincidence.
"The real purpose is to sell the rights for the Arab authors in English or other languages," said exhibition manager Emma House.
There have been recent literary successes originating from the Arab world -- notably, Egyptian author Alaa al-Aswani's "The Yacoubian Building", which was translated into 21 languages including English.
But Arab authors who have attracted the eye of British editors remain few and far between.
Publishing house Penguin, for one, is hoping young Saudi author Rajaa Al-San'a's "The Girls of Riyadh", due out in paperback in June, will capture readers' imaginations.
The novel tells the story of four 20-something Saudi women and has been a hit in Arab countries.
Climbing the best-seller list in Britain remains tough, however, for translated novels -- just four percent of fiction books published here are translations, from all languages combined.
For its part, the London Book Fair organised 20 seminars and invited authors and major publishers from the Arab world to help them promote their literature amongst Western professionals.
Sarah Ewans, the British Council's regional director for the Near East and North Africa, said British publishers have told her that they face several obstacles when it comes to Arab literature.
In particular they have trouble identifying good books, lack Arabic-literate staff to read them, and do not have the necessary distribution networks.
Despite that, the British cultural organisation had seen "a real increase of the interest for Arabic literature" in the past two to three years, said Ewans.
Several countries, including Lebanon, Oman and Saudi Arabia, even set up their own stands at the fair to help promote their country's writers.
"The market is potentially very large" for Arab authors, said Margaret Obank, founder of the Banipal publishing house which sells English translations of Arabic books.
"After 9/11 people thought, my god we ignored that (part of the world)," she said.
"They now realise there is literature out there."
Despite all that, having to translate books remains a major barrier holding back greater literary exchanges between the West and the Arab world.
A 2003 report from the United Nations Development Programme estimated that just 50 Arabic-language books a year were translated into another language.
Samuel Shimon, the author of "An Iraqi in Paris", which has just been published in French by Actes Sud, hopes that the success of his novel in France will help him promote it in Britain.
"Everyone has been asking me about who holds the rights to my book -- it has sparked real interest," the author said.

GREAT NONSENSE HUMOUR! - Smelly Cat - Ambulance driver

2008-04-03T12:10:00.001Z

1st April in Zimbabwe & Mugabe plays everyone for a fool!

2008-04-01T18:42:00.006Z

Mugabe creates April Fools out of the Opposition.

Reports emanating from Zimbanwe suggest that Robert Mugabe is to step down from power. These unsubstantiated comments from a variety of news sources seem optimistic about the outcome of ongoing talks brokered by South African politicians and aimed at a peaceful handing over of power to the opposition.

It's obvious that Mugabe has lost the election both at Presidential and Parliamentary level but will he lose in the talks to determine the outcome. I doubt it. I'm cynical about what is taking place behind closed doors.

If he's lost the election why can't the Authorities declare this and get on with creating the next Government?
Where is the army ~ loyal to Mugabe for decades ~ in these talks. What do they want out of the situation?
Can Mugabe for once in his life recognise the reality of what he has created? Again, if previous behaviour is taken into account, he will fight to stay as President.

So we have Mugabe again hanging on to power. How long will it be before talks break down and the army is on the street hounding the opposition?

Days? Hours?