The Guardian's Blog, page 19
February 19, 2016
Stan Lee: the greatest storyteller in history?
Creator of a host of enduring superheroes, from Iron Man to the X-Men, his own powers have enabled him to see far into the future
A billionaire industrialist developing technologies that others believed impossible. A team of heroes using science to understand the universe. A secret government agency protecting its citizens from threats that may not even exist. No, these aren’t characters in a Stan Lee comic: Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the heroic researchers at LIGO, and the secretive folks at the NSA and GCHQ are very real parts of a world – ours – that seems to become more like an extension of the Marvel universe every day.
Unless you’ve been in cryogenic deep freeze for the last decade, you’ve probably noticed the wave of Marvel film and television franchises breaking relentlessly across the entertainment landscape. What’s slightly less obvious is that almost all these stories were originally created by the same comic book writer. Deep breath: Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, SHIELD, Daredevil: all of them were created by Stan Lee.
Related: Deadpool's success accelerates the inevitable: total geek domination
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February 18, 2016
Food in books: apple cake from Our Endless Numbered Days
Kate Young tries a simple but comforting meal cooked by the characters in Claire Fuller’s novel – a father and daughter who spend years in a remote forest cabin
By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network
Michael trailed off as Oskar came in with a tray laden with the best teapot, the bone china cups and saucers from Germany with the ivy pattern, and the Apfelkuchen that Ute had set out earlier.
Our Endless Numbered Days, Claire Fuller
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February 16, 2016
Translation Tuesday: Bin Bags by Enrique Winter
Do we love those who make us suffer more? A man reflects on love and sex in this extract from Chilean poet Enrique Winter’s new work, Bin Bags
By Enrique Winter and Ellen Jones for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network
Every morning Brian is in the habit of washing his arsehole with balsam, the way Eugenio used to like it. The upstairs bathroom is also shared, but it’s kept clean enough, because of the big window and because he’s included in a rota that the girls on that floor had inherited from other girls. He lathers his legs, the hair’s growing back, and he asks himself how something so obvious – that if you love someone you never stop loving them, dead or alive – is mentioned neither by the people giving the advice nor by those taking it. When you’ve loved someone, you’ll always love them. That’s all there is to it. He closes his eyes to rinse himself off. You can survive with that, with or without your loved ones. You don’t replace them, you add to them. He dries himself, some parts better shaven than others, and the towel keeps Eugenio at the forefront of his mind: once, Eugenio, when he was wrapped in a towel, said he made people see what they didn’t know they didn’t want to see. Brian then demanded an explanation and Eugenio spoke at length while he got dressed about how he provoked people who swore they were as liberal as can be.
No matter whether they were men or women, he had always liked the bad ones
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Achilles is brutal, vain, pitiless – and a true hero
Homer’s idolised demigod in the Iliad has plenty of loathsome aspects – but remains a magnetic figure it’s hard not to admire
After a week spent discussing the challenges the Iliad presents modern readers, I’m going to try for something more positive. I say “try” because if there’s one thing that reading ancient Greek literature has taught me, it is to beware of hubris. If I were to try to list all the things that I think matter about this book it might well result in a list as long as the catalogue of the ships. Instead, I’d like to focus on just one aspect of the poem: the man who gets its first line and whose wrath sets it all in motion, Achilles.
Achilles does not fit modern sensibilities. He is a killer, arguably a rapist, certainly a pillager. He is sulky, high-strung and oh boy, is he temperamental. He can be pitiless – actively enjoying the iron in his heart – and he can be murderously cruel. Yet there is still something fundamental about him to which we can all relate, even if it is also something particularly hard to rationalise and explain. He is faster, sharper, bigger, brighter and more important than other men. He is more beautiful. He rides on deeper emotional currents (when Achilles is upset, he is seriously upset). He is semi-divine and wholly precious. Other men cannot even aspire to be like him. At his most resplendent, men cannot even bear to look at him. He is just above and beyond.
Related: Can Homer's Iliad speak across the centuries?
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February 15, 2016
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, with writers competing for a reader’s mental space and loads on War and Peace, including bets and online resources for those of you who are attempting to read it.
VelmaNebraska has just finished reading Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44:
[It] struck me as tremendously well-written and evocative but finally just too deliberately positioned as a blockbuster. The opening chapters, moving from starvation to Stalinism, were like brutal fairytale fragments – difficult to chew through – before settling down into a relatively straightforward “on the trail of a serial killer” vibe. I won’t give away the ending, except to say that it was altogether too psychologically pat for my tastes, which was rather a shame.
Connected, in a way, was Forced Entertainment’s precise staged reading of Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook, which I saw last night. For over two hours, with only two chairs and scripts in hand, Richard Lowdon and Robin Arthur, often speaking in dispassionate unison, embody young twins who survive the second world war by creating their own moral code and shared language. It’s been touring for a couple years now and is really quite astounding.
Oh, my!
Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett are competing for my heart these days, mano a mano. One topples the other off the pinnacle with every latest book. Patchett will get her chance again, later this year, but for now it’s Strout! Strout! Strout! From a Guardian I tried it twice before and failed when I got to seemingly endless battle chapters. This time, I am following the troops on google earth.
The only drawback: I have to wait watching the TV version until next year. –kakaokuchen
Poem of the week: Slow, Slow, Fresh Fount by Ben Jonson
Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears;
Yet slower, yet, O faintly, gentle springs:
List to the heavy part the music bears,
Woe weeps out her division, when she sings.
Droop, herbs and flowers,
Fall grief in showers;
Our beauties are not ours:
O, I could still,
Like melting snow upon some craggy hill,
Drop, drop, drop, drop,
Since nature’s pride is, now, a withered daffodil.
This week’s poem, sometimes anthologised as Echo’s Song, is from Act I, Scene 2 of Ben Jonson’s “comical satyr” Cynthia’s Revels, or, The Fountain of Self-Love.
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Infinite Jest at 20: still a challenge, still brilliant
Finding my way around David Foster Wallace’s monumental maze of a story has ruined my social life and made my brain hurt – but its rewards are as big as its size, writes Emma-Lee Moss
The first of February saw the 20th anniversary of a work considered by many to have changed the rules of fiction: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Last year, having never progressed beyond the book’s first chapter, I decided to mark this occasion with a personal commitment: by midnight on its birthday, I would give up membership to the ordinary world, and join the club of determined readers who have made it to the end of the novel.
At more than 1,000 pages – with copious footnotes – Infinite Jest is a famously difficult read. It is the Gen-X Ulysses that even those like me, who consider themselves DFW superfans, are nervous to attempt, many preferring to feed their devotion with his essays and short stories. Set in a North America of what was, in 1996, the near future, the novel follows a breathtaking number of characters. They are all somehow tied to the destiny of the Incandenza family and its youngest son, Hal, a tennis prodigy who, before the novel begins, finds his father’s body after a microwave-based suicide.
Related: A lifelong apprenticeship: David Foster Wallace and Bryan A Garner on writing
Related: Why David Foster Wallace should not be worshipped as a secular saint
But you never know when the magic will descend on you. You never know when the grooves will open up. And once the magic descends you don’t want to change even the smallest detail. You don’t know what concordance of factors and variables yields that calibrated can’t-miss feeling, and you don’t want to soil the magic by trying to figure it out, but you don’t want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle of incidence to the sun.
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February 11, 2016
Food in books: kedgeree from The Camomile Lawn by Mary Wesley
As she discovers the joy of early mornings, Kate Young re-reads Mary Wesley’s war-time novel – and recreates a dish relished by its characters’ in their last idyllic summer
By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network
‘Father says General Peachum is the most gullible man he’s ever come across. Any kedgeree?’
‘I ate it.’ Polly got up from the table.
The Camomile Lawn, Mary Wesley
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Publishers should pay authors as much as their other employees
There’s nothing to publish without writers, so why are they being pushed to extinction by their appalling pay?
Writers and publishers are in it together, I tend to feel. Not always in a cuddly way. Sometimes more in a screaming-down-the-mineshaft way. But in one critical respect the partnership feels increasingly strained.
Last month, the Society of Authors wrote an open letter to publishers calling for better, fairer contracts. To quote US media lawyer David Vandagriff, publishing contracts “stand apart from the general run of business agreements as conscience-shocking monstrosities”. Think supermarkets and small dairy farmers. Think, as Philip Pullman recently put it, steamrollers and ants.
Related: Authors call for boycott of festivals that do not pay
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February 10, 2016
John Lennon, 1980 and me: an appreciation of Kevin Barry's Beatlebone
Lorraine Berry was 17 when Lennon was assassinated in 1980. Kevin Barry’s acclaimed novel Beatlebone, about the musician’s experiments with primal therapy on a remote island just before his death, stirred up personal memories of that shocking autumn
The eighth of December has always been an easy date for me to remember: my parents married on that day in 1962, and John Lennon was assassinated in 1980, when I was 17.
“You never get past what happens to you when you’re 17,” says John Lennon in Kevin Barry’s recent novel Beatlebone. I don’t count myself among the believers of that view, but reading Barry’s book skirred me back to being 17 so often that time lost its boundaries while I read.
Related: Beatlebone by Kevin Barry review – a darkly wry trip to Beatle Island
Related: Kevin Barry: ‘I want to go as wild as I can within my stories’
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