The Guardian's Blog, page 121
June 27, 2014
How far can culture heroes' work stand apart from their lives?
SFF community reeling after Marion Zimmer Bradley's daughter accuses her of abuse
It's a truism that the writer you read on the page is not the writer you meet in the flesh. It's for exactly this reason that meeting our cultural heroes is so often a profound disappointment. The transcendent singer on the stage is a bawdy lech in the bar. The poet who expresses beauty in words is a drunken misanthrope in person. So we commonly separate the artist from the human being, the icon from the reality. But when the actions of our cultural heroes go beyond bad behaviour, into to moral outrage, illegality and immorality, that separation becomes far harder. And in some cases, impossible.
The accusations of child abuse levelled at science fiction author Marion Zimmer Bradley, who died in 1999 age 69, are of the most serious kind. Published last week on the blog of Deirdre Saoirse Moen, these accusations come from Bradley's own daughter, Moira Greyland. They include accounts of physical and sexual abuse, and were later joined by a brutally affecting poem written by Greyland in "honour" of Bradley, Mother's Hands. Bradley's reputation when alive had already been considerably damaged by the conviction of her husband on charges of child molestation in 1990.
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June 26, 2014
Are authors running out of book titles?
People first started to notice last year when Kate Atkinson's Life After Life coincided in the US with Jill McCorkle's Life After Life, which had been published just six days earlier. Since then examples of novels with the same name have kept on cropping up. There is, for instance the story of Canadian writer Erica Schultz, who had no idea when she brought out Joyland in 2005 that Stephen King would find that title irresistible eight years later. This resulted in King fans buying Schultz's ebook in error, initially irritating her, but she's "not so upset any more" after receiving "a big royalty cheque for those mistaken books".
Could authors and publishers be starting to run out of titles? It can look that way when you come across examples such as Bret Anthony Johnston's Remember Me Like This (just out, and this week's Book of the Week on Radio 4) and Sabine Durrant's Remember Me This Way (out in mid-July), from divisions of the same publisher yet both granted their unaccountable wish to reference the same 1970s Gary Glitter single.
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Jonathan Swift transport back to 18th-century London
The prime minister is under attack, the Tories are tearing themselves apart and pollutants fill the broiling London air. Oh, and it's 1714.
John Arbuthnot's letter to Jonathan Swift, written three hundred years ago on 26 June 1714, offers a snapshot of literature, politics and science which reveals how much and how little has changed.
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Judy Blume's next book is one for adults to look forward to
For all you fellow Judy Blume fans out there, here's some fabulous news. The author, whose stories about growing up have tapped into the psyches of children everywhere, is in the middle of writing her first novel for adults in 16 years.
Beloved for children's books including Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, Blubber and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Blume is also the author of three novels for adults: Wifey, Smart Women, and her biggest bestseller Summer Sisters, which tells of the intense friendship between two young women over almost 20 years. Summer Sisters was first published in 1998; the author's editor in the US, Carole Baron at Alfred A Knopf, has now told the New York Times that Blume's next novel for adults will be published in summer 2015.
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Literary clock: help us find quotes for the missing minutes
We're winding up our 24-hour literary clock again in an attempt to find a quote for every moment of the day and night: can you fill in any of our empty moments?
Inspired by Christian Marclay's astonshing film collage The Clock, the Guardian's literary clock is appropriately enough one of our longest-running collaborative projects. Marclay created a fully-synchronised cinematic clock that ticks through a full 24 hours, from High Noon to Chimes at Midnight and back again. So back in 2011 we started assembling something similar with words, making use of the whole corpus of literature and most importantly, readers' help.
The project has accumulated hundreds of contributions that have helped complete most of the 1,440 minutes that make up a day's 24 hours. Last year we put the clock on display at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. But as we prepare to head up north again, we're looking to fill the remaining slots.
At 8.29 I punched the front doorbell in Elgin Crescent. It was opened by a small oriental woman in a white apron. She showed me into a large, empty sitting room with an open fire and a couple of huge oil paintings.
3.49 p.m. Get off school bus at home
Wells looked out at the street. What time is it? he said. Chigurh raised his wrist and looked at his watch. Eleven fifty-seven he said. Wells nodded. By the old woman's calendar I've got three more minutes.
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June 25, 2014
How to read to babies without feeling ridiculous
New guidelines from the American Academy of Paediatrics state that parents should be reading to their children from infancy. For the first time, the organisation is going to promote "early literacy beginning from an infant's very first days as an 'essential' component of primary care visits".
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June 24, 2014
David Mitchell's unusual adventure into history
Webchat with David Mitchell: 10 things we learned
In his New Yorker review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, James Wood wrote: "The historical novel, typically the province of genre gardeners and conservative populists, has become an unlikely laboratory for serious writers, some of them distinctly untraditional in emphasis and concern."
Robert Graves would have been spinning in his grave.
"To have the action taking place in just one place, at one moment in history a Dutch trading enclave in Japan at the end of the 18th century seemed to give the novel more gravity than Ghostwritten or Cloud Atlas."
"I didn't set out to write a historical novel just for the heck of it you'd have to be mad. Rather, only within this genre could the book be written."
"I suspect that the historical novelist's genetic code contains the geeky genes of the model maker there is pleasure to be had in the painstaking reconstruction of a lost world. A second reason is banal but overlooked: a story has to be set both somewhere and 'somewhen', and the choice is restricted to the present, the future and the past. A third motive is the challenge (and perverse pleasure) of tackling the pitfalls, foremost of which is research. Film-makers ruefully observe how every decade back in time the film is set x million dollars gets added to production costs. The same principle applies in novel-writing, but instead of dollars, read 'months'."
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Thomas Pynchon's drinks cabinet
It's the sort of project only Thomas Pynchon can inspire the author whose devoted fans hold an annual Pynchon in Public day, have created a huge playlist of songs mentioned in Inherent Vice and extensively, obsessively annotated his books. Thanks to Penguin Press for alerting us to a venture that seems well worth publicising: one blogger's plan to drink "everything mentioned however peripherally in every Pynchon book and jabber... a bit about what it's like".
The appropriately named Drunk Pynchon blogger is not doing it all at once. The project began in May, and there's been "Chivas Regal scotch", as mentioned in V. ("I'm tempted to say that a screaming comes across the tongue ... But no screaming comes. It's just beautifully smooth and syrupy. Tastes warm and a bit spicy. A little banana-ey? Smells terrific too").
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June 23, 2014
14 quotes from writers inspired by football
Oscar Wilde, George Orwell and Nabokov all had views on the beautiful game. As England head for the exit from the World Cup, console yourself with the wit and wisdom of literature's parlour pundits
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 week's blog. Here's a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
edinflo has been enjoying My Life in Middlemarch, New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead's account of her love for George Eliot's novel:
I read Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch in two days flat. It's something of a hybrid: a potted biography of George Eliot; an account of how Middlemarch was written; and an extended essay on how the book has affected Mead personally at different stages in her life and, more generally, how books affect us and how our experiences can change our reading of them.
Despite the title, there is more about George Eliot than Rebecca Mead in the book, which I think is a good thing. Mead is our way in, but Eliot keeps us there what an interesting person! I'm now on the hunt for a good biography of her.
I do like these books about books. I've read two recently - Laura Miller's The Magician's Book (about The Chronicles of Narnia) and Careless People by Sarah Churchwell (about The Great Gatsby). When they are done well they can be insightful and illuminating, not just about the book/author in question, but about that strange relationship between author-book-reader and the transformative power of reading.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. What an eye opener. Made me realise how little I know about medicine and history. Everyone should read the tale of the HeLa cells and what they have done for mankind and where these cells came from.
Im reading Daughter Of The Desert: The Remarkable Life Of Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howell. Its proving to be a suprisingly easy read about an interesting subject. Born in 1868, Bell was a phenomenally gifted person who became all of the following: a mountaineer of note, archaeologist, cartographer, scholar, photographer and a respected authority on the Arabic lands in the Middle East. She was fluent in six languages, travelled around the world a couple of times and was a notable horsewoman. The legacy she will be most remembered for is her involvement in the carving up of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the first world war and specifically the establishment of Iraq as a separate country.
Reading books on soccer, naturally...
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By cfwaters
16 June 2014, 15:06
Holiday meant I read less than planned, but travel did enable me to get through 2 books in a few days, firstly there was Three Graves Full by Jamie Mason, an intelligent quirkily plotted crime novel, about a man who discovers bodies in his back yard that aren't the one he put there, and his attempts to hide his burial.
Secondly though was Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig a fantastic urban fantasy/horror/thriller novel, that is the first in his Miriam Black series of novels, funny exciting, violent and speedily placed, possibluy my read of the year thus far.
I had started the first Maisie Dobbs and it's OK. For hot weather, I had started reading the ebooks mystery series (all with Witness in the title) by Rebecca Forster. These books are great for hot weather when you really can't think. I'm on #6, which I was saving for hot weather. A woman detective gets in and out of trouble, but they are colorful.
When it was cooler, I had just begun Wretched of the Earth for a short while before or after I did art before breakfast. Then I'd switch over to Maisie Dobbs.
I originally read Cider with Rosie a about a squillion years ago and I can remember endlessly reading passages from it to my first wife under the influence of a glass or two, or more often a bottle or two, too many. Now I can see why. I recently picked up a copy from my usual source, the book stall in the Wells market, and from the first line onwards it was obvious why it is such a classic that has gone into so many editions. What a joy of a book and what an absolute landmine of language. Every paragraph is a perfect gem, so much so that its impossible to choose any one over another. His descriptions of the locals, Cabbage Stump-Charlie, Tusker Tom, Albert the Devil and Harelip Harry had me weeping with laughter and his sketches of his siblings and of course his wonderful and chaotic mother had me in tears.
Its been said of Elvis Presley that after him there was no point in any other pop singer. Thats also true of this book. Until I read it I thought I could write. Now I know how far down the literary food chain I really am. Do not dare to die without having read it.
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