The Guardian's Blog, page 138

Lady Chatterley's ale lover naming a literary pub

DH Lawrence's home town has named a new inn after his most famous novel. What would you like to read on a pub sign?

The DH Lawrence Society is an august institution based in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the former coalmining town where Lawrence was born in 1885. So when it teamed up with the local newspaper, the Eastwood Advertiser, to ask readers to vote for the name of a new pub, one might have expected a choice from the respectable end of his oeuvre The Rainbow, perhaps, or, for a bit of added glamour, The Plumed Serpent.

But no. Beneath a notice in the Advertiser that the next DH Lawrence Society talk would be Helen Baron on Lawrence's Exploitation of Trains in his Fiction comes a slightly surprising announcement: "The DH Lawrence Society is delighted that readers of this paper voted to name the new public house on the Nottingham Road The Lady Chatterley and are looking forward to the opening on Midsummer's Day, June 24, when it is hoped, subject to the agreement of Wetherspoons, that members will be able to assist with the appropriate launch of this venue by reading some short passages from Lady Chatterley's Lover and other works by DH Lawrence."

Paper vs digital reading is an exhausted debate

Tim Waterstone's claim that ebooks are in decline isn't persuasive and there are far more urgent matters for readers to discuss

The digital revolution is going into a decline, Tim Waterstone told the Oxford literary festival. Well, it's an attention-grabbing statement, ideally suited to our culture of assertive headlines, but it's probably not true. That's not to say that the rapid growth of digital will necessarily continue, either, certainly not in markets that are already saturated with handheld devices.

Poem of the week: Never Entered Mind by Tom Raworth

This avant-garde poem fizzes with a splintering energy that keeps the reader asking questions and constructing possible meanings

There are no daffodils or pagans dancing in this week's poem, by Tom Raworth, but it bursts on the senses with a spring-like ferocity, closer to Stravinsky than Wordsworth. "Bubble" in line three is suggestive. Language here becomes a series of word-bubbles: some connect, some don't, but perhaps it doesn't matter. This is poetry as linguistic Big Bang, where word-forms are still being born, and are not yet oppressed by the need to bond in logical communities. Of course, this is illusory: the words are laden with histories, some of which coagulate (to steal an idea from the last line). But even as old denotations are recalled, the signifiers assert unusual independence. The title, Never Entered Mind, might be a clue.

So does the poem bypass the organisation of meaning? Not at all. It begins with a sentence, perfectly structured if surreal, and a syntactical framework is sustained throughout. Swiftly, in the second line, comes "introspection", a noun which deliberately introduces the idea of an entered mind. On an even cursory inspection, the poem conveys a minute orderliness of structure: it's arranged in couplets, usually trimeters, with three words per line until the last line, and an intriguing pattern of first-letters, predominantly F, M, A and G, M, I. Sometimes the ground seems all bubbling "fermentation" and sometimes it's solid, the couplets behaving like the reassuringly neat pathways they're not. Raworth might be playing a series of jokes on the reader. His poem is no more pinned down than a symmetrically-patterned rug laid out on a seethe of bubbles. But it keeps the mind afloat.

Leading authors axed from Prospect magazine's list of top 50 thinkers

Philosophers advance on a list which finds space for more women, while intellectuals from Richard Dawkins to Francis Fukuyama to Steven Pinker lose out

Identifying the thinkers who are "engaging most originally and profoundly with the central questions of the world today" is clearly a horribly tricky task, yet Prospect magazine has chosen to make its public intellectuals poll an annual affair, after previously leaving a five-year gap.

A year ago, judges including Amy Chua, Bernard Henri-Lévy and David Miliband decided on a longlist of 65, and public voting produced rankings headed by an all-male top 10, with Richard Dawkins at No 1. This time an unnamed "panel of writers and editors" picked 50 names which are almost laughably different, with all of the 2013 list's top five left out and only Ha-Joon Chang, Peter Higgs, Elon Musk, Martha Nussbaum, Arundhati Roy, Amartya Sen and Slavoj iek of its top 20 retained. Last year's celebrity panel, and last year's voters, have in effect been given a telling-off by these shadowy selectors.

Why are booksellers afraid of children's poetry?

Teachers, parents and poets alike know how children thirst for poetry. Now it's up to booksellers and publishers to save it from extinction

Children dive into poetry with the same natural ease as swimmers into water, climbers into trees and sleepers into dreams. I've seen this alchemy at work on countless visits to schools, visits which have convinced me that poetry's narrative, rhythm and vibrant imagery is the real language of childhood. But poetry written for children is in danger of dying out, of sliding into fossilised irrelevance, cut off from modern verse. A classic such as Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses may be lovely, but it can't sustain the vital connection between children and poetry. Children also need poets who are still breathing.

The delicate machine which brings poetry books into the hands of children is in desperate need of repair. I used to help choose the poems for the Children's Poetry Bookshelf, the Poetry Book Society's book club for ages seven to 11, and I watched with horror as the submissions from publishers gradually dried up. Starved of funding and support, the club had to stop taking on new members in 2011. As PBS director Chris Holifield said, it seemed that "children's poetry in book form was close to extinction, with just a small number of new titles being published and not much backlist being kept in print."

Hopes for greater books coverage dwindle as BBC axes The Review Show

Despite director general Tony Hall's announcement of the biggest arts push for a generation, the BBC shows no sign of producing topical book shows or books documentary series

Asked in last week's Radio Times if she would like to see more "programmes that cater for bookworms", Kirsty Wark replied: "I have to be diplomatic because there's going to be a big announcement about BBC Arts". And when the big announcement came this week, in director general Tony Hall's presentation detailing "the biggest arts push for a generation", literary initiatives were indeed mentioned, but on inspection they don't amount to much that's new.

Noticeably they're largely short-lived projects, annuals not perennials: there's no sign of a topical books show or books documentary series. Dead writers will have to await their anniversaries to be feted (next up: a Dylan Thomas season), while the only hope for living ones who are not global celebrities lies in the multi-arts programmes, Imagine, The Culture Show and, until it was scrapped this week, Wark's The Review Show. Although the BBC is to replace Sky as the Hay festival's broadcast partner focusing on authors, but tellingly in their second lives as performers.

What are the great sentences in genre fiction?

What makes a world-class literary sentence, and can genre writers ever compete with stylists such as Jane Austen or James Joyce?

What makes a great literary sentence? I've been thinking about this in advance of a debate I'm chairing at the Oxford literary festival this weekend on whether there is any difference between literary and genre fiction.

Then, as if from the depths of my subconscious, up popped a blog from The American Scholar listing their editorial team's 10 favourite sentences. (Well, 11, actually, as they threw in Truman Capote as a bonus.)

George RR Martin releases new chapter of The Winds of Winter

Ahead of the new season of Games of Thrones on TV, the author has published an unseen chapter from the 6th book in the A Song of Fire and Ice series online and it's a cracker

Just before season four of Game of Thrones hits the telly, and George RR Martin has scattered a few crumbs of bounty for the series's millions of avid readers, in the form of an unseen chapter from the forthcoming sixth book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, The Winds of Winter.

"The new chapter is actually an old chapter," writes Martin on his website. "But no, it's not one I've published or posted before, and I don't even think I've read it at a con (could be wrong there, I've done readings at so many cons, it all tends to blur together). So it's new in that it is material that no one but my editors (well, and Parris, and David and Dan, and a few others) have ever seen before, but it's old in that it was written a long time ago, predating any of the samples that you have seen. The first draft was, at any rate. I've rewritten it a dozen times since then."

#Twitterfiction festival 2014: what you are (and are not) missing

The second Twitter fiction festival is in full swing, but does the social media website's limit of 140 characters inspire good writing?

Alexander McCall-Smith, Anne Boleyn's dog and God himself are taking part in this year's Twitter Fiction Festival, which is running over four days until March 16.

Authors, poets, humorists and novices have been selected to write 140-character stories and tweet them out with the hashtag #twitterfiction. Regular Twitter users are encouraged to join in with their own stories.

Lorem ipsum translated: it remains Greek to me

The apparently random Latin placeholder text, used to help design pages, has been translated. Despite the absence of meaning, it's weirdly mesmerising

My excitement over JRR Tolkien's forthcoming Beowulf translation had some calling me, in no uncertain terms, a geek. Perhaps that's why I'm so taken with this valiant attempt at translating Lorem Ipsum, the standard dummy text for printers which is a mangling of Cicero, and which dates back to the 16th century.

Used to fill blank space on a page before the proper copy is ready, it starts: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam hendrerit nisi sed sollicitudin pellentesque. Nunc posuere purus rhoncus pulvinar aliquam. Ut aliquet tristique nisl vitae volutpat. Nulla aliquet porttitor venenatis. Donec a dui et dui fringilla consectetur id nec massa. Aliquam erat volutpat. Sed ut dui ut lacus dictum fermentum vel tincidunt neque. Sed sed lacinia lectus. Duis sit amet sodales felis. Duis nunc eros, mattis at dui ac, convallis semper risus. In adipiscing ultrices tellus, in suscipit massa vehicula eu."

Nick Richardson at the London Review of Books asked Cambridge academic Jaspreet Singh Boparai to have a stab at translating it; he came up with the weirdly compelling:

"Rrow itself, let it be sorrow; let him love it; let him pursue it, ishing for its acquisitiendum. Because he will ab hold, unless but through concer, and also of those who resist. Now a pure snore disturbeded sum dust. He ejjnoyes, in order that somewon, also with a severe one, unless of life. May a cusstums offficer somewon nothing of a poison-filled. Until, from a twho, twho chaffinch may also pursue it, not even a lump. But as twho, as a tank; a proverb, yeast; or else they tinscribe nor. Yet yet dewlap bed. Twho may be, let him love fellows of a polecat. Now amour, the, twhose being, drunk, yet twhitch and, an enclosed valley's always a laugh. In acquisitiendum the Furies are Earth; in (he takes up) a lump vehicles bien."

"It's like extreme Mallarmé, or a Burroughsian cut-up, or a paragraph of Finnegans Wake," muses Richardson. "Some of the new coinages are intriguingly ambiguous: 'concer', both cancer and conquer (and conker); 'somewon', a prize and a person; 'tinscribe', to engrave on tin?"

I asked Boparai how he came up with his version; he said his "basic challenge was to make this text precisely as incoherent in English as it is in Latin - and to make it incoherent in the same way".  

So, "the Greek 'eu' in Latin became the French 'bien' in my translation, and the '-ing' ending in 'lorem ipsum' seemed best rendered by an '-iendum' in English".  

"I could only do this by steadfastly refusing to see the wood for the trees, and faithfully reproducing every error, and every minute instance of 'what the fuck does this mean?'," he said. " When you spend eight hours a day reading Renaissance Latin texts you get used to elaborate Ciceronian syntax that makes no sense whatsoever, and so the absurdity of this content left me serenely unperturbed."

Well, I love it, just as I love the fact Richardson also points his readers towards the host of comedy Lorem ipsum generators that exist online – how did I not know of the existence of Samuel L Ipsum, "motherfucking placeholder text motherfucker"? This is important stuff to ponder, people, and what the internet is for, surely …

PublishingReference and languagesAlison Flood
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