The Guardian's Blog, page 34
November 16, 2015
Spies and Communists
The Shadow Man: At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle by Geoff Andrews, IB Tauris, 275pp, £20
One spring evening in 1937, James Klugmann accompanied John Cairncross, his friend from Cambridge University, for a walk in London’s Regent Park.
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November 14, 2015
Shelley’s agitprop poem granted freedom at last
The Bodleian Library has belatedly made Shelley’s ‘Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things’ available to all – and it’s dangerously seditious stuff
Shelley’s poem has escaped. For the past nine years, his “Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things” has been held in private hands, not freely available. Some context: in 1811 Shelley was 18, at Oxford, when an Irish journalist, Peter Finnerty, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for libelling the secretary of state for war, Lord Castlereagh. Finnerty’s articles revealed the horrors of a war against the French in the Netherlands and accused Castlereagh of trying to silence him. The case caused a stir, a campaign was kicked off by Sir Francis Burdett and Shelley wrote the 172-line “Poetical Essay” in praise of Burdett as a fundraiser for Finnerty. It appeared on 2 March 1811, then disappeared from view until July 2006, when Professor HR Woudhuysen announced in the TLS that the poem had “come to light”.
The problem was that it only came to light for Woudhuysen, the owner of the poem and a handful of people permitted to read it. I campaigned for the poem’s release, unsuccessfully trying to raise the ire of the Eng Lit community, or the interest of the BBC. The Guardian, to its credit, reported the situation in full.
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November 13, 2015
The latest weapon of political dissent: reading
A student in Illinois spoke volumes by reading Claudia Rankine’s Citizen at a Donald Trump rally. Which book would you reach for to speak truth to power?
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could make your political positions register internationally by the simple act of, you know, reading a book? Johari Osayi Idusuyi, a student in Springfield, Illinois, has done just that. By a sequence of accidents, Idusuyi found herself sitting in the VIP area of a rally for bizarre presidential hopeful Donald Trump. Perhaps in the hope of presenting Trump as friendlier to African Americans than most people would assume, one of his people ushered the black student into a seat directly behind the entrepreneur turned demagogue.
A woman, in an attempt to counteract the crazy, reads CITIZEN during a Trump rally. Hat-tip: @JeffShotts1 pic.twitter.com/iNZ10gBPOv
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November 12, 2015
A long way to the shortlist: choosing the Guardian first book award finalists
Reading through the enormous variety of debuts – from biography to memoir to poetry and fiction and beyond – has been a tough but exciting challenge
There is something wonderfully expectant about a prize for a first book, particularly one that welcomes first-time writers regardless of genre, category, form or language.
The varied rollcall of past recipients (Yiyun Li, Jonathan Safran Foer, Petina Gappah, Zadie Smith, Dinaw Mengestu among them), and the Guardian first book award’s international status, makes the reading journey more of a quest than – as some book awards seem to be – a standard nod to likely candidates.
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Happy 100th birthday, Roland Barthes
Little did the great demythologiser know that after his death he would become famous, commodified and mythic himself
In Mythologies, his influential 1957 collection of micro-essays on topics ranging from striptease to steak-frites, Gide to Garbo, Roland Barthes used “myth” to mean things wrongly taken to be natural, that which “goes without saying”, the “falsely obvious” – cultural phenomena or celebrity representations in need of “demystification”. Then an obscure researcher, Barthes was not to know that after his death (in 1980) he would become famous, commodified and mythic himself, with today’s centenary of his birth in 1915 heralded by academic conferences, a Bibliothèque Nationale exhibition in Paris and even a Hermès tribute scarf priced at €895.
In the Barthes myth, what goes without saying is that he practised structuralism and/or poststructuralism and was a literary critic who believed that authors were somehow “dead”. Each has some truth, but represents only one strand or phase of his writings. He did borrow a structural approach from linguistics and anthropology, but only from Elements of Semiology in 1964 to S/Z, his experiment-like dissection of Balzac’s “Sarrasine”, in 1970; the science-mimicking approach and advocacy of neutrality disappeared (though not the urge to theorise) in his markedly subjective final decade, which included first-person musings on photography, The Pleasure of the Text, a fragmentary novel, journals and travel writing.
Related: Roland Barthes' challenge to biography
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Umberto Eco: ‘Real literature is about losers’
In his only UK public appearance to mark publication of his new novel, Numero Zero, the Italian novelist explored the nature of conspiracies and why great characters are never successful
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Since the publication in 1980 of his first novel, The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco’s work has come to be defined by a curious paradox – you never quite know what to expect but you can be absolutely sure that it will will bear the unmistakable stamp of Umberto Eco.
Plots will unfold with grand conspiracies at their centre, where the obscure details of history mingle with the unknown. Those truly directing proceedings will always remain in the shadows and further intrigue is never more than a few pages away.
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November 11, 2015
Literature as last bastion: Natalka Sniadanko on suppression, solidarity and language in Ukraine
The Ukranian author explains why professional writers simply ‘do not exist’ in her country in this essay about its literature and culture
By Natalka Sniadanko for The Writing Life Around the World from Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network
There’s a café in downtown Lviv near the Armenian church that takes its customers back to the 1980s: little tables on wobbly legs, cakes covered in bright buttercream frosting flowers, then-fashionable liqueurs lined up above the bar—not to mention the unusual way they have of brewing coffee. The woman at the bar taps out sugar and organic coffee into a special little long-handled pot to which she then adds water. Next she sets the pot atop a very anachronistic-looking contraption, a box in which tiny iron filings are heated up on a very low current. Paying absolute attention, she keeps the pot on the device until exactly the right moment, when she stirs its contents with a thin wooden stick. She meticulously monitors her clientele’s movements once the coffee’s served, delivering well-timed instructions to stir again or to pick up the little pot, or, finally to pour it into the little cup. The coffee’s foam must increase threefold before it can be considered ready.
It was here, in 'the Armenian,' that the city’s bohemians would gather in the 70s, 80s, and part of the 90s
Ukrainian literature – or Ukrainian culture more broadly –employs the word 'last' often
The Ukrainian language was reduced in the popular imagination to a 'dialect' of Russian, unable to function on its own
Many publishers are going out of business, and those that linger are still unable to publish debut authors
'Professional' writers who live solely off the work they publish in Ukraine simply do not exist
Ours is a form of proletarian solidarity, but it is powerful and reliable
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What's the best reading for heartache?
For Coldplay’s Chris Martin, ancient Sufi poetry and a spot of Victor Frankl are the bookish balms of choice. What are yours?
“Your missus has left you and you don’t know where to turn, do you go down the pub with your mates or do you read 13th-century Persian poetry?” was the Mirror’s unexpectedly literary rhetorical question this week.
Why, Persian poetry of course, if you’re Chris Martin. Newly separated from Gwyneth Paltrow, as the paper reported, he cited Rumi’s poem The Guesthouse as the antidote to being “down and confused”.
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November 10, 2015
Translation Tuesday: Prologue to Bacchae by Euripides
The third in a series on translated work features the prologue to one of the most famous plays in history, translated by Aaron Poochigian
By Euripides and Aaron Poochigian for Translation Tuesdays byAsymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network
Welcome to the Guardian Books Network
Dionysus:
Here I am, Dionysus, Zeus’s son,
I have compelled this town to rant and howl, dressed it in fawnskin
Beat time now, and let the townsfolk stare!
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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 from last week. As you might have gathered, Marta is away at the moment, and I have been so busy without her that the upset caused by some aggressive commenters over the last fortnight passed me by.
I can only apologise to anyone who has been offended, emphasise how highly we value this thread and (almost) everyone who contributes to it, and second TimHannigan’s words:
I’ve said a whole bunch of times in the past that this is just about the single nicest little corner of the internet I’ve ever come across. It does seem like it’s come under assault a few times of late, but it’s probably something that can be resisted quite easily if we put our minds to it. Trolls tend to get bored very quickly. @conedison points out he’s been contributing here for four years; you’re average troll doesn’t last more than a few weeks.
I’ve been reading A Brief History of Seven Killings, it’s tough going to be entirely honest, pages and pages of patois, a myriad of characters that fleet in and out of the cacophony of noise that seems to be happening everywhere in the book.
I’ve not finished it yet, but I’m bearing my way through it.
I have just read this book too. What can I say - I am a white English/Irish person who has no affiliation with Jamaica; her politics or history. I have never visited Jamaica but have always had a soft spot for Bob Marley. Didn’t even remember there was an an attempted killing on him - that’s how much history passed me by when I was young.I liked this book because it seemed to tell a sort of truth about colonialism...yes another ..ism. I liked all the ‘bad’ characters in the book-even Josie Wales was a victim of the ‘shitstem’. There are so many wasted deaths in this book - but I will always remember Bam-Bam...and his Dad’s Clarke’s shoes. This book tells you something about the CIA and its reach - don’t know if this is true or not but it makes you think.
As expected, a wonderful book. There are very few historians who can make dry administrative history fascinating, but Beard achieves this and many other things. A fascinating political, social, cultural, literary history of ancient Rome from its beginnings to Caracalla (more or less.)
Anyone like a laugh? Just finished Another Great Day At Sea by the inimitable Geoff Dyer - so deft, so amusing and less than 200 pages long. Geoff is Writer In Residence for two weeks on the aircraft carrier USS George HW Bush, patrolling the Arabian Gulf. He’s well over 6ft tall and suffers from claustrophobia so how’s that gonna go? This is a total delight like eating a slice of lemon meringue pie, frothy, tangy and crisp. Loved it.
I’ve finished Herzog, the best Bellow novel, in my opinion, that I’ve read to date. It backs up my theory that I prefer Bellow’s third-person prose, as I also enjoyed Seize the Daymore than Augie March. I think one of the reasons that I like these texts more is that there aren’t as many of Bellow’s famous ‘idioms’, which he sometimes piles on. My feeling is that they look suspiciously like cliches.
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