The Guardian's Blog, page 131
May 6, 2014
Superheroes conquer the literary novel
Superheroes have never really worked for me outside what I consider their "natural" environment comic books. Even in this post-Avengers movie age, I still find brightly-costumed heroes interacting with real life on the big screen somewhat jarring, something with which I have no trouble in the confines of a comic panel.
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May 5, 2014
Poem of the week: Gulling Sonnet VI by Sir John Davies
This week, in the sixth of a series of what he termed Gulling Sonnets, an eminent Elizabethan poet-lawyer lays out an allegorical wardrobe for Cupid. Sir John Davies dedicated the playful series "to his good friend Anthony Cooke", expressing his hope that "some rich, rash gull" would admire the poems and set himself up for further pleasurable mockery. The probable date of composition was 1594, the same year in which Davies embarked on a far more ambitious work, Orchestra, or a Poem of Dancing. He may have written the sonnet series as light relief an in-joke between young-men-about-the-Middle-Temple but it shares something of the imaginative vigour and lucidity of the longer poem.
The Gulling Sonnets have a variety of rhyme schemes. The sixth is particularly tightly woven for an English sonnet, rhyming ABAB ABAB CDC DCC. "Slight" in line 11 becomes "fleet" in some versions, promoting a fuller C-rhyme. "Garters of vain-glory, gay and fleet" is certainly convincing: the fleetness implies that the garters, though flashy, are of poor quality, as evanescent as the glory of the world and also, perhaps, quickly slipped off when the occasion arises. But "slight" is favoured by the authoritative 1973 edition of Davies's poems, edited by Robert Krueger, and seems the safer bet.
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Poll: How do you organise your home library?
May 3, 2014
From Houellebecq to Rushdie: the authors who took to the silver screen
In The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, just given its US premiere at the Tribeca festival, the eponymous French novelist stars as himself. Guillaume Nicloux's film takes a real recent incident Houellebecq's mysterious disappearance during the publicity tour for his Prix Goncourt-winning novel The Map and the Territory, in which he similarly appears as a character and wryly purports to show what really happened: he was abducted and held captive by three brothers, who, despite his irritating ways, gradually came to respect him.
While Houellebecq may be the first novelist to have a film built around him, thespian turns by authors of his stature are by no means uncommon. One Nobel laureate, Harold Pinter racked up a long list of acting credits in film and TV (from The Servant to The Tailor of Panama), as other actor-playwrights Alan Bennett, Sam Shepard have done. Another, Gabriel García Márquez, played a cinema-ticket seller in the 60s Mexican film There Are No Thieves in this Town, in which the film director Luis Buñuel and the novelist Juan Rulfo were also in the cast.
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From Houllebecq to Rushdie: the authors who took to the silver screen
In The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, just given its US premiere at the Tribeca festival, the eponymous French novelist stars as himself. Guillaume Nicloux's film takes a real recent incident Houellebecq's mysterious disappearance during the publicity tour for his Prix Goncourt-winning novel The Map and the Territory, in which he similarly appears as a character and wryly purports to show what really happened: he was abducted and held captive by three brothers, who, despite his irritating ways, gradually came to respect him.
While Houellebecq may be the first novelist to have a film built around him, thespian turns by authors of his stature are by no means uncommon. One Nobel laureate, Harold Pinter racked up a long list of acting credits in film and TV (from The Servant to The Tailor of Panama), as other actor-playwrights Alan Bennett, Sam Shepard have done. Another, Gabriel García Márquez, played a cinema-ticket seller in the 60s Mexican film There Are No Thieves in this Town, in which the film director Luis Buñuel and the novelist Juan Rulfo were also in the cast.
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May 2, 2014
Eating your words: the joy of literary cookbooks
For collectors of literary recipes, a significant gap was recently filled with the publication of Jans Ondaatje Rolls's The Bloomsbury Cookbook. Eating the same meals as virtually every British writer from Chaucer and Shakespeare to CS Lewis and Terry Pratchett was already possible, but Virginia Woolf, EM Forster and Lytton Strachey had been unaccountably left out.
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Poster poems: Owls | Billy Mills
Driving home late the other week I was startled by a sudden apparition that flew out of the night, passed in front of my car and disappeared again. It was, of course, an owl, that great symbolic bird whose associations with the night, death, wisdom and the numinous make it one of the most written-about of all birds of prey. There was a kind of calm dignity to this chance encounter that led me to reconsider a poem I had recently discovered, Polly Atkin's the bird that makes you afraid [PDF], a title that derives from the Cameroonian name for owl. Atkin's poem is a catalogue of reasons to fear, and yet my encounter resulted in a feeling that was quite different, a kind of calm awe.
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Humanity's future depends upon good grammar | Hadley Freeman
Blog: The Bad Grammar award is prize stupidity
So far in my four decades, I have lived a life blissfully free of controversy. No paparazzi have ever staked out my front door and, with the odd (in both senses of the word) outraged commenter aside, I have never, to my knowledge, sparked loathing and fury in anyone I either know or don't. So it was with an ease prompted in equal measures by naivete and common sense that when Tom Hodgkinson of the Idler Academy emailed me several months ago to ask whether I would like to be a judge for this year's Bad Grammar award, I agreed with not the slightest bit of hesitancy.
Well! Who knew that an interest in how the English language works was tantamount to announcing oneself as a frothing-mouthed raving loony? Are sentence structures the new poll tax? I could only assume so from the frankly hilarious rage that greeted the announcement of our shortlist this week. I feared I had failed in my capacity as a judge already when my presence on the panel did not prevent the prize from being raged against on the website I write for, when one especially outraged chap wrote that I and my fellow judges, Jeremy Paxman and Rowley Leigh, were "peddling sneering, condescending, dismissive, misanthropic, elitist, made-up twaddle"? He suggested that our rackety prize was some kind of undefined Gove-ian conspiracy and, perhaps mistaking our prize for actual legislation, that we were "language police". I could spend longer dismantling this particular blog but, first, life's too short and, second, seeing as the gentleman's main objection seemed to be that the prize was inspired by a book (that I had heretofore never encountered) called Gwynne's Grammar, and he himself has written a competing grammar book, I'm not convinced there's really any need.
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May 1, 2014
May's Reading group: Leave It To Psmith by PG Wodehouse
Leave It To Psmith has come out of the hat. This is the second novel in the much-loved Blandings Castle saga, and the fourth and last featuring Psmith (with a silent 'P'). Wodehouse later explained that he left the character of Psmith behind because he couldn't think of anything else for him to do. Part of the reason may be that he chucked everything at him when he visited Blandings. This book boasts a plot complicated and farcical even by Wodehouse's standards. We can expect dark conspiracies, missing items, frantic attempts to put those items in the right hands, trouble with flowerpots, rages from Blandings' head gardener Angus McAllister, absent-mindedness from Lord Emsworth and best of all a visit from literary types to the castle. One can only expect that these latter will be ridiculous...
And if that hasn't whetted your appetite enough, here's the first sentence:
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Scanner for ebook cannot tell its 'arms' from its 'anus'
The top 5 embarrassing printing errors. Can you do better?
Smart Bitches, Trashy Books is already one of my favourite books blogs, but editor Sarah Wendell has now raced to the top of my list for, well, everything after her amazing spot yesterday.
"So if the text is old, and it says 'arms', the OCR [optical character recognition] scanner will see it as 'anus.' OMG," Wendell tweeted. She was referring to optical character recognition, a process by which printed texts can be scanned and converted into ebooks. According to Computer World, it has been "long used by libraries and government agencies to make lengthy documents quickly available electronically."
"Mrs. Tipton went over to him and put her anus around his neck. " My dear," she said, rapturously. " I have been hoping for years that you would talk that way to me."
From the title Matisse on the Loose: "When she spotted me, she flung her anus high in the air and kept them up until she reached me. 'Matisse. Oh boy!' she said. She grabbed my anus and positioned my body in the direction of the east gallery and we started walking."
Also: "Mrs, Nevile, in exquisite emotion, threw her anus around the neck of Caroline, pressed Her with fervour to her breast".
And '"Bertie, dear Bertie, will you not say good night to me" pleaded the sweet, voice of Minnie Hamilton, as she wound her anus affectionately around her brother's neck. "No," he replied angrily, pushing her away from him."' Well, wouldn't you?
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