The Guardian's Blog, page 63
June 5, 2015
Poster poems: marriage
For Shakespeare it is an ‘ever-fixed mark’, for Larkin it is a source of cynicism and renewal. This month, vow to reflect on wedlock with all its passions, trials and tribulations, then post your poems in the comments
In the wake of last month’s historic Irish referendum vote to legalise same-sex marriage, it struck me that a Poster poems challenge to celebrate the august institution of wedlock might just be in order. There is, after all, something profoundly poetic about a popular vote to second Shakespeare’s refusal to admit impediment to a marriage of true minds, regardless of gender.
Weddings have always been occasions for celebration, and it is not unusual to find poets writing odes on marriage – both their own and other people’s. One of the earliest and best English poems to mark the union of others is Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion, which was written as a “Spousall Verse in Honour of the Double Marriage of Ladie Elizabeth and Ladie Katherine Somerset”. It’s a poem of great charm, and the refrain, “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song,” is one of the best-known lines of poetry in the language.
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June 3, 2015
Craig Raine poem prompts Twitterstorm
Seventy-year-old poet’s Gatwick, fantasising about a young airport worker, unleashes stream of parodies
The poet Craig Raine is no stranger to the sexually risqué - his very first collection, The Onion, Memory, famously quoted the morning-after fantasy of the lascivious butler who Henry Green said had inspired his novel Loving. The borrowed line, in Raine’s poem Bed & Breakfast, involved smelly fingers and buttered toast, and - combined with the image “five pink farrow suckle at each foot” - prompted reviewer Gavin Ewart to reflect: “When the Metaphysicals went too far, weren’t they a bit like this?”
But Bed & Breakfast was published in the days before Twitter, where Raine’s latest poem, printed in this week’s issue of the LRB, has unleashed a stream of parodies and seen him trending alongside Andy Coulson and Rafael Benitez.
That Craig Raine poem in precis: I perved over a young woman, but it's not filthy because I kept it to myself. But then I published it.
Ode to Craig Raine: pic.twitter.com/Zc72pWA17S
In the room the women come and go. Talking of Mr Craig Raine-O. (I'm a famous heterosexual man, you know.)
That dramatic pause - In your poems Is there to make us think You're deep But we both know You're really not
sext: babe I promise I won't craig raine on your parade
'Craig Raine, the poet?' We have less than half a minute. 'I studied you. For my MA at uni. I did an MA in misogyny and the male gaze.'
POEM I agree with Craig Raine: Fancying someone at the airport and not being able to snog them is a pain. Also: high risk of delayed plane.
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How crime fighting provides clues to crime writing
As well as procedural rules, my past life as a police officer taught me how to tell the painful human stories behind the charge sheets
People are often surprised when I tell them I used to be a police officer. I’m not sure whether it’s because I don’t look physically capable of wielding a baton or simply because the leap from copper to writer is not an obvious one. But everyone comes from somewhere, don’t they?
Few authors make a success of their writing straight from school. For most of us it is a second (or third, or fourth …) career, and what better grounding for a novelist than the police force? Where else can you experience the raw truth of society, unprotected by the comfortable bubble in which so many of us grow up? Where else can you meet a cross-section of society, from aristocracy to the homeless, and learn that criminality isn’t confined to the latter? Where else can you witness human emotion at first hand, and be privy to some of the most intimate and heartbreaking moments in someone’s life?
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Jilly Cooper's Riders: why the toned-down cover?
Small but ‘unsexy’ adjustment to the jacket art for a new edition of horsey bonkbuster has provoked a startlingly big fuss
There is a scandal going on in the world of books this week. And it’s not Philip Larkin’s distaste for literary parties, nor the depressing research showing that books about women are less likely to win literary prizes.
No. The Times, and the Daily Mail via the Times, inform us in no uncertain terms that the Issue of the Week is the slight change that has been made to the new cover of Jilly Cooper’s Riders.
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June 2, 2015
How to survive literary parties: tips from Francis Plug
The shy but not exactly retiring author offers some tips on getting through publishing bunfights, and meeting the great unwashed
A recently unearthed letter from Philip Larkin described literary parties as his “idea of hell on earth”. He saw such gatherings as “a lot of sherry-drill with important people”. Yes, this sounds awful, agreed. But for the modern author, it’s not just the literary set you have to cope with. It’s the great unwashed as well. You’re expected to sherry-drill with unimportant people, too.
More than 30 Booker prize-winners were forced to deal with me, for instance, as I researched my book Francis Plug: How to Be a Public Author. I’m not even particularly interested in literature, let alone charismatic, or socially blessed. Some people have actually found me “unbalanced”, or in Martin Amis’s case, “psychotic”. But this hasn’t prevented me from speaking with them. And let’s face it, most famous authors are a bit unbalanced too.
Related: Dread of literary parties led Philip Larkin to shun Oxford poetry professorship
Dear Anita,
Hi, it’s me again. Sorry for the barrage of mail, but I still haven’t heard from you. You’re a busy woman, I understand perfectly, so I’ll try and keep this succinct – you already know all about my gastro/indigestion problems!
To recap, I’m trying to get books signed by all the Booker prize-winners, but I think you may have been hiding from me. Don’t worry, it’s fine, it’s fine.
Related: Francis Plug by Paul Ewen review – the Dennis Pennis of fiction
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June 1, 2015
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
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Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, on subjects ranging from how authors’ personalities influence our reading experiences to the pleasures of browsing, via many lists of the books our readers have enjoyed most this year – plus our favourite literary links.
MsCarey shared her enthusiasm for In The Light Of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman:
I loved it. It’s a properly big book which thinks seriously about all sorts of things and is unashamed to do so. What makes it exceptional though is that the writer is as adept at the central story as he is with the intellectual whys and wherefores. There are all sorts of fascinating digressions but it’s still a page-turner because you are so desperate to find out what has happened to the central character, who is beautifully drawn. The narrative moves from Oxford to London to New York to Islamabad to Kabul to Bangladesh in order to illuminate some of the big events of the twenty-first century. Supremely entertaining and clever light years beyond my puny abilities. This is a debut novel and I can’t wait to see what Zia Haider Rahman will write next.
Good if you like a bit of subtle social commentary about the differences between cultures, in this instance, the French and the English. It is a reflection of Mitford’s own life, an Englishwoman who lived in Paris for a number of years. I’m quite obsessed with the lives of the Mitford sisters (check out Mary S Lovell’s biography, it is wonderful), so I thought I better get round to reading one of Nancy’s novels. I was very pleased to find that it was as amusing and engaging as I hoped it would be, as I imagine she was.
I have been wavering on my TBR list of fiction and non fiction, and the best I could do was browse 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, a collection of largish volumes of related books, (paintings , classical recordings, movies, news stories) with resumes of a wide range of books. I say browse, there are many ways of reading, but browsing suggests this hot lazy summerlike perusing of books, poems , newspapers, magazines etc, interspersed with youtube and other internet delights, to amuse a leisured soul.
At the moment I am trying to transform from a night owl to a morning lark, but it is hard going changing the habits of a lifetime, is it best to read in the quiet of the night after a tiring day, or in the early morning after a refreshing sleep? – by Stantom.
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Poem of the week: All Day It Has Rained by Alun Lewis
The relaxed details of a slow Sunday at a military training camp in ‘Edward Thomas country’ mix with foreboding about what will follow
All Day It Has Rained
All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors
Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,
Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground
And from the first grey wakening we have found
No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain
And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap
And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap.
All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream,
Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream
Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly
Snatched from their cups by the wild south-westerly
Pattered against the tent and our upturned dreaming faces.
And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces,
Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks,
Reading the Sunday papers – I saw a fox
And mentioned it in the note I scribbled home; –
And we talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome,
And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities
Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees:
Yet thought softly, morosely of them, and as indifferently
As of ourselves or those whom we
For years have loved, and will again
Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain
Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.
And we talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome,
And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities
Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees:
Yet thought softly, morosely of them, and as indifferently
As of ourselves or those whom we
For years have loved, and will again
Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain
Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.
May 28, 2015
June's Reading group: The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
For the next month, as he turns 60, we’ll be investigating one of literature’s best loved psychopaths
Ah, summer! Doesn’t it just make you want to jump on a boat to somewhere sunny, make a brand new friend, and kill him with an oar?
No?
Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way. Tom walked faster. There was no doubt that the man was after him.”
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May 27, 2015
Virginia Woolf should live on, but not because of her death
Her genius continues to inspire all manner of new artistic work, but far too much of it fixates on her suicide over the vivid life of her fiction
Virginia Woolf may be famous for her death – she drowned herself in 1941 – but she is enjoying an uncommonly busy afterlife. A seemingly unending stream of novels, plays and films seek to re-animate her, fictionalising Woolf’s life - and death. And it ripples out: her wider circle, the Bloomsbury group, are also regularly brought back to life for our entertainment.
Three novels in the past year have channelled Woolf. Norah Vincent’s Adeline floats between the inner lives of Lytton Strachey, Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Priya Parmar’s Vanessa and Her Sister ventriloquises Vanessa Bell, letting us see Woolf through her long-suffering sister’s eyes (the perspective, too, of Susan Sellers’ 2008 novel Vanessa and Virginia). Maggie Gee more literally resurrected her in Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, imagining the author suddenly appearing in a New York library in the present day.
May 26, 2015
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.
A particular welcome to ID061182, who dipped a tentative toe into the water expecting it to be chewed off by trolls, but instead found a warm reception for all three recommended books, but particularly for this perceptive reflection on Christos Tsiolkas’s Barracuda:
This is a far more powerful book than The Slap. It charts Danny’s miserable school days as a scholarship boy in a private school, his ambition to be an Olympic swimmer, his failure, his shame, and his disintegration and alienation of his family and friends. Perhaps my abiding memory, however, will be all the smells in the novel - Danny is obsessed with his body, and particularly his own and other people’s bodily odours. Ripe!
Interesting point about smells in Barracuda. Only now that you say it, yes, it’s notable. It’s not typically a sense that is prevalent in or conveyed well in fictional everyday life, despite its constant and often evocative presence in real everyday life. Mixed opinions about Christos Tsiolkas kept him off my TBR. Then I heard him on this Guardian podcast and was gripped by his storytelling ability on air. He got me engrossed in a podcast about sport, for pity’s sake.
Great novel, bought it at King Cross station, very funny . great insight into post Iron Curtain East Germany and a teacher's disdain for her pupils.
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By ID5097862
25 May 2015, 11:11
I’m about ten pages from the end of my book, so another “What to read next?” crisis is impending - torn between JG Ballard, Anthony Trollope, the new Stephen King, and whatever else is crammed into my work locker...
My “What to read next?” dilemma has just been resolved by an email from my local library. Reserved Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread two long, sodding months ago. Dear god, hope it lives up to expectations.
You’ve got something to look forward to! Anne Tyler is a great storyteller, and I would rate this one as one of her very best. 2/3 into the novel you may think she kind of loses the plot, but actually she doesn’t and it all comes together in the end.
He is based on a real-life Australian war hero, affectionately known as ‘Weary Dunlop’. He had to contend with some pretty shocking conditions, such as having to amputate limbs without anaesthetic. So, hard as it is to believe, Evans isn’t too good to be true.
The real surprise for me was the fiery heart of the story, Dorrigo Evans. I didn’t really like him. Well what’s the harm in that, you’ll say. Unlikeable protagonists can be fun. Sadly it wasn’t that sort of unlikeability for me.
The first of a set of 12 by Winston Graham- loving the BBC adaption, so am catching up before the next series!
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By EveMaria
24 May 2015, 0:54
Can someone recommend a good book regarding “Philosophy on Literature”? Thanks.
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