The Guardian's Blog, page 65

Dorothy M Richardson deserves the recognition she is finally receiving

Richardson’s modernist masterpiece Pointed Roofs earned her a place alongside Woolf, Joyce and Proust. As a plaque is unveiled in her honour 100 years later, the celebrations seem long overdue

A hundred years ago, Gerald Duckworth’s publishing company brought out a little book by an unknown writer about a student teacher in Germany. It was called Pointed Roofs, and its author was Dorothy M Richardson.

The story was narrated entirely through the consciousness of the heroine, Miriam Henderson, and readers and critics alike were both bewildered and excited. A reviewer in the Manchester Guardian, for example, although sure that the novel was “almost startlingly original”, could not pin down why, concluding rather helplessly: “It is a novel that no sensitive reader will forget. Its charm cannot be communicated.”

Related: May Sinclair: the readable modernist

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Fantasy must shake off the tyranny of the mega-novel

The triumph of George RR Martin has made publishers greedy for multi-volume stories, but not all authors can write them – and why should they?

If, like me, you haven’t had the chance to catch up with John Gwynne’s ongoing four-book series The Faithful and the Fallen, then you might have greeted the news he’s landed a “six-figure deal” for another three novels with a shrug. But the arrival of yet another writer “in the tradition of George RR Martin and David Gemmell” has set me thinking about how the fantasy genre found itself overrun by multi-volume novels.

Money talks, of course, and ever since Tolkien laid down the basic three-part formula, his vision has gradually expanded into the multi-volume moneyspinners of today. If every reader has to buy 15 separate volumes of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time at £8.99 a pop, that adds up to a 44m-copy pay day for his publishers. But this commercial appeal is clogging up the genre with tome after tome of schlock, as anyone who has had the misfortune of being trapped in a confined space with only a Terry Goodkind novel for entertainment can confirm.

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Books about Portland: readers' picks

The Pacific Northwestern city offers a range of reads, from jazz era tales to bleak portrayals of modern American life. Here are some of our readers’ favourites

Jon Raymond introduces the literature of Portland

The “idea” of Portland only entered the popular imagination in recent years, chiefly thanks to the comedy TV show Portlandia, as Jon Raymond wrote recently. But this city, known as a haven for vegans, iced latte lovers (yes, flat white fever hasn’t conquered America – yet), beards, fixed-gear bike worshippers and any other hipster stereotype you want to invoke, is more interesting and surprising than this suggests.

Whether you’re planning a trip to this Pacific Northwest city or you want to find out more about it through its literature, you’re in for a treat, thanks to a collective brainstorming we did with our readers. Here are the top picks. Is your favourite missing? Do add it in the comments.

“It is love, in all-American, over-salted, extra-large portions, that makes The Free original and compelling. [...] Freddie and particularly Pauline waddle triumphantly out of their heaps of shopping and stacks of bills as convincing, heroic people, and provide ample shoulders over which to peek at Vlautin’s blasted vision of the US.”

I drifted and I drifted, ended up in Wyoming/I got so broke I sold my car.

Look, here’s a piece of advice. What you do is you think about the life you want, you think about it in your head. Make it a place where you want to be: a ranch, a beach house, a penthouse on the top of a skyscraper. It doesn’t matter what it is, but a place that you can hide in. When things get rough, go there. – from The Motel Life

Fugitives And Refugees is that most quaint of things, a travel book - but it’s not quite the book his publishers hoped for. Instead, it is a series of essays, postcards and ruminations on the underbelly of his home town, Portland. Yet beneath the profanities and the glitz of his new book [...] there is a calm, spiritual Palahniuk fighting to get out. This side also struggles out in conversation, sometimes in the most unexpected of ways.

Katherine’s theory is that everyone looking to make a new life migrates west, across America to the Pacific Ocean. Once there, the cheapest city they can live in is Portland. This gives us the most cracked of crackpots. The misfits among misfits. ‘We just accumulate more and more strange people’ she says. ‘All we are are the fugitives and refugees.’

Action central was Williams Avenue, an entertainment strip lined with hot spots where you could find jazz twenty-four hours a day. What is now the Rose Quarter used to have a lot of other names. Any cabby worth his fare would have known that Black Broadway, the other side, colored town, all meant the same thing: the Avenue, namely Williams Avenue. Fifty years ago you could stand in the middle of the Avenue (where the Blazers play basketball today) and look up Williams past the chilli parlors, past the barbecue joints, the beauty salons, all the way to Broadway, and see hundreds of people dressed up as if they were going to a fashion show. It could be four in the morning. It didn’t matter; this was one of those ‘streets that never sleep’.

Mala Noche, also one of Van Sant’s first films, captures well 1970s Portland, before Skid Row residents were evicted and the area was turned into “The Pearl” and homeless shelters and cheap hotels became stores selling expensive junk. As a native of Jerusalem and a resident of Portland for many years (with stays in London, Eugene, Davis and Berkeley) there is much to recommend the city, the mountains, trees, and many progressive minded people.

I don’t want to interfere with their lives. A gringo like me has an easy life. A privileged life. And just because I see someone attractive like Johnny it doesn’t mean I should be able to have him, to buy him or whatever, just because he’s hungry and on the street. Desperate, good-looking. That wasn’t my intention exactly, but it could be misunderstood that way.

A woman made of parts is a dangerous thing. You never know when she’ll throw away a piece you may need.

Math can explain the reason there’s one out of four chance that I’d have blue eyes. But it doesn’t explain why me.

Fantastic books for older kids (my daughter is 12 and we read them aloud). Wildwood is a magical land across the river from Portland that seems stuck in the late 19th century, with some extra magic thrown in. On one level, Meloy is writing a gentle satire of beardy hipsters. But on most levels, Wildwood is a great adventure story featuring cool kids saving the world.

My dear Prue, we are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos. It is a hopeless task.

That attitude of smugness held sway in Portland for several generations, keeping the place hidebound and insular. Consequently, Portland was largely unprepared for the influx of population.

Nobody has any rights unless they’ve got a machine gun.

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Is the self-publishing stigma fading?

For a long time, going the DIY route repelled critics, publishers - and readers. But as its successes accumulate, so the shame falls away

“Sorry – no self-published books accepted.” How many authors have been confronted with those words? I certainly have. It’s a prime example of what has been dubbed the self-publishing stigma. But as the sector grows, shrugging aside suspicion and hostility, will this negative image fall away? Has it already begun to do so?

I jumped into the game in late 2010, when the concept of being an indie author was still relatively new. Like most others at that time, I tottered about, toddler-like, trying to find my way through this new and strange landscape.

Related: Self-published star Jasinda Wilder lands seven-figure deal with traditional imprint

Related: Self-publishing’s vices and virtues

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Poster poems: ottava rima

Dating back to Boccaccio, this form has been adopted by everyone from Spenser to Yeats. Now it’s your turn

It’s been a long time since we had a Poster poems challenge based on a poetic form, so I thought this month we should look at something we’ve never tried before. Ottava rima is an eight-line stanza developed in Italy, usually associated in English with Byron and his fellow second-generation Romantics. The standard rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c and in English the lines are usually iambic pentameters.

The earliest known ottava rima poems were written by Boccaccio, including two long epic works, Teseida and Filostrato. These poems established ottava rima as the default stanza for epics on serious themes, a use that persisted in Italian until at least the 16th century, when Torquato Tasso used it for his embroidered tale of the Crusades, Gerusalemme liberata.

Nothing has changed. No science can
protect the effects from the cause.
The birth, freed from the family plan,
reverts to genotypal laws.
The furies’ midwife genus, Man,
put back the morsel in the claws
of those whose chromosomes were rent,
contributing their fifty percent.

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Why Dylan Thomas deserves his international Day

Thomas wrote with unforgettable eloquence about being human, in an English that remains uniquely Welsh. Gillian Clarke, national poet of Wales, explains why he is great

• Open thread: what makes Dylan Thomas great?

On 14 May, 1953, Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood had its first staged reading at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center in New York. From now on, the event will be commemorated with Dylan Day, an international celebration of the life and work of the Welsh poet.

Thomas is a great writer because he wrote with accuracy and truth about being human. His language is inventive, yet stolen and re-made from every word he read, every phrase he heard. His poetry, including Under Milk Wood, which I’d call a radio poem, leaves echoes in the mind as music does, as all true poetry should. His prose shows a hawk’s eye and ear for detail; fierce, but shaped by tenderness, fearless honesty and humour. The whole man, body and mind, and the whole life are in the words. We see ourselves on the page, feel the arrow in the heart. He gave not a toss for any critical reader but himself. Music and truth, the qualities of all great writers, are what convinces us to read him, to believe him. James Joyce, one of his inspirations, is a prime example. There is no contrivance, no self-consciously “good English” in such writing.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it
was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.”

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Kafka's Metamorphosis and its mutations in translation

Kafka’s haunting story is a century old this year. Numerous translations have re-shaped it into English, but which is the most successful?

It’s one of the most famous opening lines in literature:

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt”

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

did the manager himself have to come, and did the whole innocent family have to be shown in this way that the investigation of this suspicious affair could be entrusted only to the intellect of the manager?”

One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin.”

When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed.”

As Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin.”

[The picture] showed a lady posed sitting erect, attired in a fur hat and fur boa, and raising a heavy fur muff, which swallowed her arm right up to the elbow, towards the viewer.”

When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed right there in his bed into some sort of monstrous insect.”

One morning Gregor Samsa woke in his bed from uneasy dreams and found he had turned into a large verminous insect”

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Guardian first book award: 16 years of talent-spotting

As nominations for 2015 open, it’s a good time to remember that the prize isn’t just the sum of its winners but of all the shortlisted stars of the future

• How to enter the Guardian first book award

When the Guardian first book award was launched in 1999, Zadie Smith was a smart student still waiting to be published, and a shocking account of the Rwandan genocide caused a stand-off between judges and reading groups before narrowly beating David Mitchell’s first novel to the inaugural prize.

The Rwanda book was Philip Gourevitch’s magisterial We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. Mitchell’s debut was Ghostwritten, which some fans still maintain is his finest work, and Smith would burst on to the literary scene in 2000 to take the prize with White Teeth.

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Terry Pratchett's Night Watch - politically inspiring, gloriously funny

Reading group: In this book we see the author maturing along with his storytelling skills, while losing none of his wit

How’s this for a cynical analysis of last week’s general election?

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness.

... the bastards, the rich bullies, the wheelers and dealers in people’s fates, the leeches, the hangers-on, the brown-nosers and courtiers and smarmy plump devils in expensive clothes, all those people who didn’t know or care about the machine, but stole its grease...”

Related: Is The Colour of Magic a good introduction to Terry Pratchett?

There was a rustle of hessian, and then:
‘Er... it’s half a brick,’ Ned reported.
‘What?’
‘A half brick sir.’
‘I’m saving up for a house,’ said Vimes.”

This garden didn’t get much proper light. Gardens like this never did. You get second-hand light once the richer folk in the taller buildings had finished with it.”

‘When I die,’ said Lawn, inspecting the patient, ‘I’m going to instruct them to put a bell on my tombstone, just so’s I can have the pleasure of not getting up when people ring.’”

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Shirley Jackson's mothering memoirs peel back the treacle of Mother's Day

The horror writer penned two amusing books on family life Vermont, but among the laughs is a sharp critique of maternal and gender norms

Is it ironic or fitting that some of the greatest American writing about that venerated and difficult activity, motherhood, comes from a horror writer? I can’t decide.

Nonetheless, I recommend that on this most sentimental of days you run to your nearest bookstore and obtain copies of Shirley Jackson’s newly reprinted memoirs of motherhood. If nothing else they peel back some of the sentimental, insincere treacle that can attach to greeting-card-holidays like today’s. If you want to honour mothers, best to have some honest accounting of their particular art.

Ninki was by this time irritated beyond belief by the general air of incompetence in the kitchen, and she went into the living room and got Shax, who is extraordinarily lazy and never catches his own chipmunks, but who is, at least, a cat, and preferable, Ninki saw clearly, to a man with a gun. Shax sized up the situation with a cynical eye, gave my husband the coldest look I have ever seen a cat permit himself, and then leaped onto the window sill and sat on the other side of the flowerpot.

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