The Guardian's Blog, page 127
May 28, 2014
The Poetry Archive makes itself new | Andrew Motion
Richard Carrington and I launched the online Poetry Archive a little under 10 years ago at poetryarchive.org. Our original intention was to combine three things: pleasure for the general reader/listener, by bringing together existing recordings of "historic" poets with new recordings of contemporaries that we would make or commission ourselves; help for students of all ages and their teachers, by combining these recordings with introductions, brief biographies, lesson plans, a glossary of terms, and all sorts of other educational bells and whistles; a safe haven for poet's voices, which would mean their voices were not lost to posterity (as for instance Hardy's voice, and Lawrence's voice, and Housman's voice have all been lost).
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May 27, 2014
10 authors who are brilliant at Twitter
They can write books, but can they tweet? Here are 10 authors you should follow
You'd think it natural that writers would be good at Twitter after all, words are their bread and butter. However, some authors have found themselves host to extremely boring feeds, or have misread the medium altogether, never quite understanding what a "mention" is, or a bit.ly link. It's a sad state of affairs when politicians are better at Twitter than literature's experts.
There are, however, a bunch of authors who have perfected their Twitter presence, in some cases earning millions of followers to go with that prized blue tick. Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman are the leading examples, but here we offer 10 alternatives whose tweets make our hearts sing.
At an awards ceremony with Martha Stewart. Life complete.
"There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will."Drake "Started from the bottom, now we're here."Shakespeare
TO A BLONDE IN THE SUBWAY Your terrified child's incessant cry of "I don't like him!" when I sat down is maybe not entirely not your fault.
Being stoned varies geographically, considerably.
New hat pic.twitter.com/AgCpPo52RT
How have I lived so long without knowing that the only full anagram of Britney Spears is Presbyterians
No more mr niche guy.
Loving @USHER'S single GOOD KISSER
A man in Ohio got 11 months in jail for having sex with a rubber float!! Couldn't make it up!!!
Oh God My. pic.twitter.com/xLRoiXquDi
I have sprung from the womb of someone who e-mails in florescent comic sans.
The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them fully developed in someone else.
The constant challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
AND I got to sing Oasis 'Don't Look Back in Anger' in karaoke. Everybody needs to do that at least once in their lives.
Somebody just told me Glenda and Dorothy were not lovers.
When your dreams are better than your waking life, you need to change things. At the very least your shampoo. But maybe more.
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Silent Spring author Rachel Louise Carson gets Google Doodle
Margaret Atwood: Why Rachel Carson is a saint
Tim Radford rereads Silent Spring
Rachel Carson, author of one of the most influential eco-manuals ever written, has been picked for today's Google Doodle, on the admittedly slightly random occasion of her 107th birthday.
Anyone unfamiliar with Carson's book The Silent Spring should take a look at this paean by Margaret Atwood, who honoured her in the second part of her Oryx and Crake trilogy, The Year of the Flood, as Saint Rachel of All Birds.
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Live webchat with PG Wodehouse biographer Robert McCrum
Read more about PG Wodehouse in this month's Reading group
PG Wodehouse was one of the most prolific writers in English prose history, producing around 100 books. He had one of the longest careers, too, from his first publication in 1901 to his death in 1975, an unfinished manuscript beside his chair. He was also one of the greatest ever masters of our language.
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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.
proust was extremely impressed with Javier Marías's The Infatuations:
Absolutely fascinating and provocative read, echoes of Faulkner, Proust, the nouveau roman, Ian Mcewan, and even Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell. This has to be one of the best novels in recent years, and I'm looking forward to exploring other works by this writer, I can't believe I have missed out. Digressive, challenging, psychologically and formally challenging.
It is a collection of intertwined essays about the decline of her mother, who has dementia, and Solnit's ambivalence as she contemplates the fraught and competitive relationship they had for most of her life. She uses this framework to explores larger ideas about stories, selfhood, memory and myth.
I really liked her thoughts on reading and the relationship between reader, book and writer:
The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
After reading a fast paced bookclub so called thriller, that was bereft of words or passages to highlight over or reread, The Blue Room was pure slow reading, rereading, joy in reading pleasure. 24 hours in the blue room and we are kept entertained, enthralled and interested in the necessary reflections of Johanne, who is locked in there. Brilliant novellla from the newly translated into English Norwegian writer.
Sent via GuardianWitness
By RedBirdFlies
24 May 2014, 7:17
Just started Robert Harris's An officer and a spy which recounts the Dreyfuss affair. I started reading it on the train this morning what a torment to have to put it down once I got to work! I am left with the image of a snowy January morning and poor Drefuss having his officers insignia torn off, his sword broken and then shouting "I am an innocent man! Vive la France!" Must read Zola's J'accuse bought a copy ages ago.
Over the weekend I read Linda Grant's essay about the painful process of getting rid of her books in order to move flats. In the best tradition of essay writing, it's not just about its apparent subject matter, but something bigger. About the attached memories, about the guilt she feels about getting rid of them but the oppressive hold they have over her because of their sheer bulk, the way they attract and trap dust, the way they decay. The way a wall of books can be at once a wonderful homely thing and a dominating unmovable feature and sabotages any attempt at redecoration, frightens off potential buyers, and , in the end, a dead weight that prevents their owner from moving on.
There is a peculiar phenomenon in English-language publishing in Southeast Asia: a ubiquitous genre perhaps best thought of as Asian sleaze. It spans fiction and non-fiction, but the cover generally features a partially clothed woman with long black hair, either in silhouette, or viewed from behind. The title is usually something along the lines of Bangkok Velvet. The author is always a white man.
Whether the book is fictional or purportedly true, it invariably features a cast of bargirls, whose portrayal is not exactly three-dimensional. It also invariably features a number of white men. If the book is nonfiction the principal white man is the author. If the book is fiction the principal white man is, well, the author (but usually dressed up as a hard-bitten private eye working in Bangkok). These principal white men do not appear to have much self-awareness. Seriously: next time youre passing through Singapore, Bangkok or Jakarta have a look in the airport bookshop. Youll see them.
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May 26, 2014
Poem of the week: The Old Familiar Faces by Charles Lamb
I've often wondered how Charles Lamb came up with the form of this week's anthology favourite, The Old Familiar Faces. It's a rare anthologist who includes any other of Lamb's poems, in fact. The poem seems to be a one-off, an unusually-shaped but fully-formed parlour piece among the more fine-grained ornaments of the better-known Romantic poets several of whom, incidentally, were among Charles Lamb's closest friends. But can the poem be without any ancestors?
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May 24, 2014
Ten of the best literary gardens
Ovid, The Art of Love (c 2AD)
Ovid's gardens influenced Shakespeare and Spenser, but probably not his porn passage in which a glade becomes a metaphor for the female body ("mid soft green turf there springs a sacred fount") and the symbolism of a male hunter entering it is equally undisguised.
William Shakespeare, Richard II (c 1595)
The queen listens as a notably brainy and eloquent gardener and servant compare their tiny domain to the state of England "our sea-walled garden, the whole land,/ is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up".
May 23, 2014
Why are literary novelists so bad at killing off their careers?
When novelists say they are retiring, experience suggests it's best to nod politely and not believe them. Philip Roth is no exception, although in his case the farewell process from revealing that he was stopping writing 18 months ago, to this week's "last" interview, with Alan Yentob over two Imagine films, that was also said to be his last public appearance (even if he wins the Nobel?) has been unusually formal and conducted in stages. Yes, he was very definite about it, but he was also on vigorous form, and we've been here before.
Unless the retirement is due to illness or incapacity as when it was revealed in 2012 that Gabriel García Márquez had dementia and so had stopped writing literary novelists tend to be as bad at killing off their careers as writers of detective fiction are at killing off their sleuths. Often what is stated or taken to be giving up writing is in fact giving up publishing. JD Salinger called a halt in 1965, but reportedly left behind five books due for phased release from next year. EM Forster's Maurice was posthumously published, as was a work he adapted into a libretto, Herman Melville's Billy Budd like Forster, Melville abandoned publishing fiction in the last decades of his life, in his case switching to poetry.
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May 22, 2014
How do you treat books?
How do you treat your books? I ask because I treat mine terribly. I love them dearly oh so dearly but I don't look after them one bit. Just look at my copy of Joe Hill's Nos-4R2.
Not in a good way, is it? This is a novel which I raced through at high speed, which I adored and which thoroughly, brilliantly, terrified me (it's about a man who abducts small children in his evil car and takes them to the creepiest of the creepy Christmasland, "where every morning is Christmas morning and unhappiness is against the law"). I was forced, however, to rip it in half, partly because I wanted to share it with someone while on holiday, partly because it was a bit heavy to lug around as it was. I haven't yet got round to sticking it back together.
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Quiz: can you identify these classic books by their covers?
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