The Guardian's Blog, page 109
August 19, 2014
Harry Potter casts an inspirational spell on Lindsay Lohan to write her memoirs
Mean Girls actors next performance will be as an autobiographer, with JK Rowling adopted as muse. Should be quite a turn
In truly magical news, actor Lindsay Lohan, 28, has announced her intention to write her memoirs, which will probably be like a trilogy, like Harry Potter because theres so many.
Leaving aside the fact that there are seven Harry Potter books and not three, the most confusing aspect to this statement is the presumably minimal crossover between the life of the former child actor and a fictional series about wizards, Horcruxes and dark magic.
I worked with a lot of girls in India that have gone through a lot of stuff, and a lot of kids who have gone through family issues or who get subjected to DUI.
I feel like my book will be more about that than anything else because theres the excitement of the life that I have lived but Ive seen a lot and if I can help anyone that might feel like its OK to screw up, its OK to feel lonely, or ugly or to feel overweight or underweight.
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Chicago: reading the midwestern metropolis of American literature
In 1920 the literary critic and satirist HL Mencken wrote in the Nation that Chicago is the "Literary Capital of the United States". Given the city's relative provinciality, marooned way out in the Midwest, it is perhaps a surprising claim. And yet this is a city that can lay claim to being the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway and Philip K Dick; the alma mater of Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut, who both studied at its university after the second world war; and during the 1920s, the unexpected cultural centre of European modernism. So how to narrow down a reading list from an ever expanding range of possibilities?
Chicago didn't really hit the big time until the late 19th century, when it became the bustling metropolis of an increasingly industrialised Midwest, and its economy based on pork, beef, and bicycles quickly aligned itself with a gritty literary consciousness; dubbed "Midland Realism". Authors such as Henry Blake Fuller practised a form of grubby urbanism whose inspiration was clearly the fin de siècle naturalism of Émile Zola. But where Zola's interest lies in the city as consumerist illusion and commercial spectacle, Midland Realism is comprehensively industrial, taking as its core narrative the futility of working class (typically immigrant) ambition eternally thwarted by a corrupt, white capitalist system.
"I am an American, Chicago bornChicago, that somber cityand go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles."
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Samuel Beckett's articulation of unceasing inner speech
Hearing voices: what's your experience when reading?
In a letter to Alan Schneider in 1957, Samuel Beckett wrote that: "My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended), made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin."
This laconic statement has nourished a vast array of critical readings focusing on the sounds of words and the presence of music in Beckett's fictional worlds. However, undoubtedly the most ubiquitous sound in Beckett's work is that of the mysterious voices buzzing, murmuring or whispering within the heads of his characters. To borrow from the narrating figure in The Unnamable (1953), the narrative core of Beckett's dark universes seems to be "all a matter of voices; no other metaphor is appropriate". The question is: to what extent are voices in Beckett's fiction just metaphorical presences?
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August 18, 2014
Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?
Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them
Welcome to this weeks blog. Heres a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
First of all, welcome to all the new readers weve been noticing in the threads in the last few weeks! We hope youre finding this enjoyable suggestions and thoughts always welcome. Weve been asking the crowds at the Edinburgh book festival to contribute to TLS in their own way. Here are some of their reads:
That is Atwood, Drabble and Forster. Differing styles, but each in their own way literary, challenging, thought provoking, and above all, for me, a good read.
Am just a few chapters into Dame M Ds The Pure Gold Baby, and what a triumph and a joy it is. Though her characters lives in the early 70s follow a more challenging and intellectual path than my own conventional one in the same period, nevertheless the sheer elegance of the prose, and peerless evocation of the period have me sighing in entranced, and amused recognition.
Loving Javier Maríass All Souls, having been bowled over by The Infatuations. Such an observant and perceptive novel of British academic life (or at least Oxbridge life). Fascinating insights into wider English attitudes and secretive behaviour. Laugh-out-loud funny in parts. More than just a campus novel. I am delighted to have discovered Marías this year, and am anticipating enjoying his other novels. Unsurprising he is a serious Nobel contender. (...) Praise for the translator, who renders perfectly the tone and tenor of Maríass prose style.
By the way, have any of you tried getting rid of your old books? I have thousands, and today I was inspired to give many of them away. A hundred are so are currently boxed up and waiting to go to a second hand store or library. All the books that I know I wouldnt read again, or if I would, I could just take them from the library, just collecting forming piles and piles and collecting dust on dust ...
I recently cleared out about half of my library, taking, as it turned out, nearly 700 books to Oxfam, taking them in carrier bags on the bus, over several weeks. I have missed a few actually. Some because Ive recommended them to friends or acquaintances and was no longer able to give them away, and a couple Ive just missed. I started re-reading some on the bus, and decided to keep them. You have to be utterly ruthless but you will be glad you did it. Reclaim the oxygen. Fly, my pretties!
Ah, I'm not being serious. I was concerned about the white cover of Truth by John D. Caputo (Penguin), so I papered over it. Also, I was worried about getting funny looks if I was seen reading a book subtitled Philosophy in Transit.
Sent via GuardianWitness
By safarikent
11 August 2014, 18:05
Just finished Don DeLillos Underworld. Absolutely loved it even though it couldve cut a few of its 800+ pages. Its wraps you so completely in post-war America that I think I might now even get baseball.
Reading the all-time great, politically incorrect Flashman series, by George MacDonald Fraser, gave me a taste for historically accurate, adventure-filled fiction. Then I discovered the African world of Wilbur Smith. Spanning many generations with the sweep of a James Michener, the action never stops. The scenes of nature, the history of Southern Africa, it opened a new world for me, one that I didnt think would interest me. Several novels later, i havent found one that isnt a masterpiece.
I just finished Paul Kingsnorths The Wake, very positively reviewed in the Guardian back in April, and recently longlisted for the Man Booker. What a treat! Not an easy read by any means (its written in an approximation of English in 1066), the book examines the guerrilla tactics against William I after the Norman Conquest. If you enjoyed Riddley Walker then youll like this, but regardless, read it anyway, its an amazing piece: it makes you work and then leaves you wanting more.
Up the Rifles!
On a Guardian recommendation Im reading Anneliese Mackintoshs Any Other Mouth, a series of short stories of which she says 68% happened, 32% did not happen. Ive read the first 5 out of 30, and am thoroughly enjoying the idiosyncratic writing style and on the edge situations she describes. The fact that some of it is true and some of it isnt adds a kind of interesting level of speculation to the reading process.
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Not the Booker prize shortlist: a long look at Cairo by Louis Armand | Sam Jordison
Full coverage of the Not the Booker prize
Let's try to get things off to an upbeat start. Louis Armand's Cairo is an ambitious book. It has multiple narratives set over dozens of locations where time is fluid, human biology and computer technology are intertwined and everyone has weird names like Joblard, Shinwah and Johnny Fluoride. It is unflinching in its portrayal of human greed, urban decay and nasty rats. It attempts to put forward complicated ideas about technology, about space-time and about the fact that our own present is looking ever more like a dystopian future.
Armand is also admirably unwilling to make things easy. Those disparate narratives appear (as one reviewer on the Not the Booker voting page put it) to be "hyperlinked" and there are strong hints at an over-arching conspiracy theory centred around a boy called Momo. But there are never any clear connections, easy answers or simplistic explanations. Armand is brave enough to challenge his readers. For that at least, we should salute him. Part of me is glad that someone should attempt to write a book like this one and that a small press like Armand's publisher Equus should have the courage to put it out.
"A riotous exploitation sci-fi noir whose action shifts from London to New York to the Australian outback, Prague and a post-apocalyptic Cairo. This novel has it all, conmen, evil doctors, rats, Egyptian artifacts, meteors, time-traveling kung-fu assassins, dwarfs, exploding heads, soy vindaloo and a long list of other extraordinary renditions."
"An intersection at the west end of Canal Street. Night. Traffic backed out of Holland Tunnel, jamming into the river, the distant lights of Battery Park Annex oozing down it. Wind And Rain. Osborne huddled against a lampost in a worn brown leather trenchcoat "
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Poem of the week: And if I did, What Then? by George Gascoigne | Carol Rumens
George Gascoigne (1539?1577) had a disappointing career at court and perhaps this accounts for the pragmatic, rather sardonic nature of his poetry. Or perhaps these characteristics hindered his advancement? At any rate, there is an independence of mind here, and a voice and tone which cut through the centuries as he exclaims, "Fie pleasure fie! I cannot like of this" or sings a lullaby to his lost youth and his lost erection. He was a clever innovator in a variety of genres besides poetry, and some of his ideas about verse composition still have currency today.
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August 17, 2014
Ali Smith, Phill Jupitus and Roger Scruton: Edinburgh international book festival round-up
From poetry to provocation, on film and in person, catch up with the highlights of a packed and wide-ranging weekend
Welcome to our round-up of the last three days at the Edinburgh international book festival. The weekend has been overwhelmingly busy, with events ranging from film to poetry, football or religion. Here are some of the highlights from our team.
One of the delights of the first week has been a series of events curated by Ali Smith under the title, Something Else. She has chosen writers who, she said, are not just at the top of their chosen disciplines but whose writing is so original, so formally attentive and so alive that they gift their chosen form with the kind of life that changes the form. With the inter-disciplinary scholar Gillian Beer she discussed Lewis Carroll, Darwin and Virginia Woolf. Well be covering their conversation in a podcast later.
In an electric session with Nicola Barker, she lured the reclusive author of Darkmans, The Yips and In the Approaches out for a rare reading. Why was she so reluctant to read her work, Smith asked. I never read from my own books because its very painful for me came the reply. I engage with my work on a screen where everything is always changeable. When it becomes text I find it really asphyxiating to look at it again and Im aways seeing things that are wrong with it. Barker also admitted to being a control freak, who once demanded that a book be printed exactly as she had written it, only to discover later that the typeface she had accidentally submitted it in had been replicated, to unreadable effect.
When a scientist comes along and says I have the answer or even There is no question, people think this guy knows what hes talking about, Id better lean on him.
GK Chesterton once said that to criticise religion because it leads people to kill each other is like criticising love because it has the same effect. All the best things we have, when abused, will cause bad things to happen.
Axel Scheffler draws a scarecrow from his new book with Julia Donaldson! #edbookfest https://t.co/F7UDhHftnB
.@PhilipArdagh joined our doodling party and drew a mouse! #edbookfest https://t.co/DgkWop1kwy
.@JackieMorrisArt doodles Mary Bear and her marmalade pot (under Mary's close supervision) #edbookfest https://t.co/PLw7CmRYap
Julian Cope, @damedenisemina and Katy Brand at #edbookfest pic.twitter.com/mhK0HDWjiN
Day three yesterday for the Book Festival, but day three today for me.
Three terrific events, each stimulating and entertaining, but characterised by different weather conditions.
There have been lots of spirited discussions and debate in the first week of the Edinburgh international book festival independence, the Middle East, the cost of a cup of tea with a sandwich (£5.60) but listen closely to the chat in the queues and there is a more unifying subject: the weather. There was a wonderfully sunny afternoon in Charlotte Square on Saturday, when the deckchairs were full and every other person had an ice-cream, but otherwise the weather has been dire. It has generally been grey-skied, cold, windy and rainy.
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Phill Jupitus, Hannah Silva, Hollie McNish and the poetry of protest
Thirty years after making his debut as Porky the Poet, Jupitus is still protesting. So whats new in political poetry?
A book festival session on protest poetry on Saturday took a nostalgic Phill Jupitus on a canter through a career that started in the early 1980s when he was a civil servant by day and fought Thatcher by night, like a kind of ideological Batman. Clutching an armful of period fanzines, he recited the first poem he ever performed as Porky the Poet: Theyve all Grown up in the Beano/ Dennis the Menace has got pubic hair/ Biffo is well into anarchy now/ Hes more of a punk than a bear
Some things change and some dont among them, Jupituss penchant for protest poetry compiled from found material
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August 16, 2014
What makes Gormenghast a masterpiece? | Marcus Sedgwick
Why The Hunger Games' Katniss Everdeen is a great female role model
When I was 15, years before they'd even thought of having a book festival in Hay-on-Wye, I was hunting around the secondhand bookshops of that town for first editions of my new hero, Mervyn Peake. I was lucky enough to be helped by Richard Booth (the "King of Hay" himself), who remarked sadly that he didn't have any of the books in stock; that it was, in fact, the off-Peake season. The trouble is, it's always been the off-Peake season.
Why is it that the three books usually (and according to experts incorrectly) named the Gormenghast trilogy never achieved the level of success of that notable fantasy behemoth, The Lord of the Rings? I am not suggesting that the two works should be viewed as counterparts, and yet in very different ways they are two cornerstones of fantasy writing in the second half of the 20th century. One is universally known by anyone who's ever become a reader; I'm lucky if I find one person who has even heard of the other in any given audience of two hundred or more.
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August 14, 2014
Scared to death: has horror fiction run out of common fears to trade on?
When Bram Stoker penned Dracula in 1897, Eastern Europe was still remote for most Britons. But Jonathan Harker's tortuous overland journey to Transylvania would today be a short hop on a budget airline. And Count Dracula, as both a Romanian immigrant and wealthy foreign plutocrat, would be attacked on arrival first by the Daily Mail for taking our jobs, and then the Guardian for forcing up property prices in the capital.
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