The Guardian's Blog, page 68

Jan Morris talks about Venice

This month the books site Reading group has been discussing Jan Morris’s classic Venice. Here the legendary author responds to questions about the city’s changing culture, its disappointing food, her involvement in the first Everest ascent - and explains why we shouldn’t call her a travel writer

I’ll keep this introduction short, because I don’t want to get in the way of the main event. Here one of our finest writers answers a long series of questions about her extraordinary life and work.

The questions are made up from a combination of the themes that arose during discussions of Venice on this month’s Reading group, and some questions taken more directly from points raised by Reading group contributors.

Related: Jan Morris’s Venice remakes the city

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Check out the Library of Congress's new audio archive online

Recordings of major authors reading and talking about their work can now be streamed, bringing them back to vivid life

What joy. The Library of Congress has digitised some of its recordings and put them up online – I spent much of this morning listening to Ray Bradbury in 1982, talking about what happens “when the doom doesn’t arrive” in a lecture called Beyond 1984.

There’s also Kurt Vonnegut, reading from Breakfast of Champions, and an interview with an elderly Robert Frost, from 1959, which seems to start in the middle with a discussion of the interviewer’s name (Frost goes off on one, a bit) but continues with the poet reading and chatting for more than an hour (I wouldn’t say his interviewer has the easiest task). Adrienne Rich also appears, as do Anne Sexton and Czeslaw Milosz.

I learned my first lessons when I was nine, 10, 11 years old. First of all I learned the world wasn’t going to end immediately. My brother and I looked in the newspaper one day, I believe it was around May 1932, and the headline read, ‘WORLD IS COMING TO AN END MAY 24th’. Seventh Day Adventists predicted this, and guaranteed it. So my brother and I could hardly wait. We got out of bed and fixed a picnic lunch, devilled ham sandwiches, coca-cola, orange crush, and we went out on a hill outside of Waukegan and we waited for the world to end.

We debated how it was going to end - a comet was going to strike the earth, a flood was going to go over Waukegan and God knows it needed cleaning anyway, and an earthquake or a fire or some horrible thing was going to happen. Well, by noon we’d eaten most of the sandwiches, and by four o’clock drunk most of the orange crush, and by five the coca-cola, and at six o’clock that night we went home very disgruntled with the Seventh Day Adventists and a little put out with God. He hadn’t brought it off.

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Kathy Acker’s pioneering adventures in the internet’s erogenous zone

The radical writer was quick to see the seductive possibilities of email. Twenty years ago she began a relationship conducted through the ether, with her playful correspondence now published as a book

In 1995, I’d just begun my freelance working life as an illustrator. I switched on the internet twice a day. International clients would still get in touch by landline, or maybe they’d fax. I didn’t use email for personal correspondence. There was no social media. It was several lifetimes ago.

In 1995, Kathy Acker – writer, artist, punk icon, best known for her transgressive, experimental novel Blood and Guts in High School – emailed cultural theorist McKenzie Wark, or rather he emailed her as she flew back to the US from Australia after their brief sexual and intellectual encounter. And she wrote back.

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Baddies in books: Cthulhu, HP Lovecraft's tentacled terror

Never fully revealed, this malevolent creature is all the more horrific for its shadowy presence

HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu is a slobbering, tentacled horror lurking on an island of impossible stone structures spat up from the bowels of the Pacific. Lovecraft wrote nearly 80 short stories between 1917 and 1935 and Cthulhu appears in many of them: in the footnotes of an old manuscript, as a word scrawled by a trembling hand in a diary, as a name screamed by a madman in a deserted town.

The presence of this eldritch terror in dozens of disparate stories gives one the impression that it lives behind the pages of the book, rather than within them. As with all of Lovecraft’s inventions, Cthulhu is never really described. It is merely assigned adjectives – “sticky”, “tenebrous”, “slavering”. But real, sublime terror does not come from description. It comes from shapes in the dark.

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Has US literature woken from the American dream?

The national myth of happiness pursued and won has always been contested in fiction – and its promise seems almost extinct in some contemporary novels

Last month, I went to see a traveling painting show at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio. The show was a greatest hits survey of mostly mid to late 19th- early 20th-century US art. The accompanying text explained that after the civil war, the aesthetics of the country shifted away from representations of the war’s devastation in favour of nostalgic, idealistic images of country suitors and boat parties or endless Frederic Remington-esque heroic cowboys and marauding Native Americans in the wild west. (Never mind the fact that the “untamed” west had already been colonised, and, with the Homestead Act of 1862, the government had been giving swaths of land to interested white settlers like a Manifest Destiny fire sale.)

Casing the galleries, I was struck by this wilful avoidance of darker, pressing realities. Art preferred to revel in a certain pastoral romanticism that seemed to promise the limitless expansion of the American dream. Only in one of the last galleries, devoted to the 1900s Ashcan school, did painters merge imported impressionistic techniques with gritty, impoverished cityscapes of the New York waterfront. More signage told the story: The Ashcan school was not very popular. I thought about the current state of the artworld in New York, where, in the midst of predatory capitalism, global disenchantment with the American ethos, and the widening gulf between rich and poor, a new form of painterly abstraction was the reigning genre. Once again, visual art seemed to be washing its hands of bleaker truths.

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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

Read more Tips, links and suggestions blogs

Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week: fabulous reads by female authors, new takes on classics, novels that should have been short stories and books-inspired food choices.

laidbackviews made a welcome return to the thread:

Gosh I’ve been neglecting you all of late. Here’s what’s been spending time on the bedside table:

Firstly a run of four female writers. Ayelet Gundar-Goshen creates some wonderful characters in her unusual tale One Night, Markovitch. Very readable. Still not sure of Rebecca Solnit, though The Faraway Nearby had some moments. Lesley Riddoch is a gem and her Wee White Blossom a fine update on the original Blossom. Visions; Hope. Finally on the girlie front we had Gertrude Bell, with her Tales from the Queen of the Desert, and as fresh today as when they were penned a century or so ago. Delightful, even having read the Persian stuff before.

I last read this in 1982. Back then the consensus seemed to be this was about history. 1948, and Soviet Russia. We’d been allowed to read Orwell and our future would be different. Wonder what new things I’ll find this time?

How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position. Tabish Khair.

The File on H. Ismail Kadare.

My perfect kind of book. Claudia is dying and thinks back over episodes in her life. Simple as that and oh so beautiful. I was worried that it was going to be depressing but the emphasis is very much on life and on how impossible it is to ever really know the whole of someone. Claudia is self-obsessed and arrogant but quite irresistible. I borrowed this from the library but have already ordered a copy as I want to re-read it at some point. It’s up at the top of my favourite of the Booker winners.

I’m reading The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuczinsky ... My partner thinks I diss the Russians too much for not knowing more about them, so this looked like a great way to get some USSR-era Russia insight. And Rysz K is always great. What a guy, like the personification of the word “intrepid”. I’m attempting it in Spanish translation though, so probably not getting the most out of it. Chapter 1, on the Red Army invasion of his home town when Ryszard was seven years old, was still harrowing.

After having seen the romantic “dramedy” One Day at the cinema, I thought it obvious to steer clear of David Nicholls’s works, and snobbishly dismissed him as the paragon of mushy lit that was not worthy of my TBR (the literary meanness can go far!). Then his latest novel Us was longlisted for the Booker, raising a few eyebrows in passing, and then a colleague of mine recommended it to me. So here I am, following Douglas and Connie whose marriage is on its last legs, and Albie, their 17-year-old son and aspiring photographer, on a Grand Tour of Europe and its numerous museums. And I have to admit it’s rather pleasing and funny in parts, although the writing is plain. The incredible weather here may soften my opinions, but after having spent the weekend with the last hundred pages of Knausgaard’s first volume of My Struggle in a bleak version of “How Clean Is Your House?”, this is the kind of novel I entirely welcome.

What I am appreciating so far is that, while Saunders’s short stories are about a particular moment or event, the worlds he creates for each are complete enough for the moment/event to become interesting and memorable (in the way that some of our own life-defining moments are). In the hands of a lesser writer, perhaps, some of these moments/events could seem rather banal and boring. It’s such an amazing and enviable skill that some of the best short story writers have: how to select just the right kind and level of detail to create and present the worlds of their stories.

“Since I’m always reading older books, I continuously come across references such as the author describes, though, not being a member of the group stereotyped, I’m sure it wouldn’t have struck me as it did her that the meanest goat in Heidi is named ‘the Great Turk’.”

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Poem of the week: from Briggflatts by Basil Bunting

The opening stanzas to this landmark work show how much can be contained in a few dense but ringingly musical lines

Briggflatts

I
Brag, sweet tenor bull,
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
each pebble its part
for the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe, bull,
black against may.
Ridiculous and lovely
chase hurdling shadows
morning into noon.
May on the bull’s hide
and through the dale
furrows fill with may,
paving the slowworm’s way.

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Books about Seattle: readers’ picks

Technology, wilderness and counterculture coexist in Seattle – our readers suggested their favourite books about the northwestern American city, and here are some of the best

Ryan Boudinot introduces the literature of Seattle

A one-time dotcom boom town, home to companies like Starbucks, Amazon, Microsoft and plenty of start-ups — and also a leading city of the anti-globalisation movement, Seattle is packed with entrepreneurial spirit, rain and contradictions. It seems to be a hard city to figure out – but books can help out.

Last week, our reader ID4993378 confessed: “As an east coast transplant, I don’t fit in well in this odd city. But Where’d You Go Bernadette? hits so many great, laugh-out-loud buttons that it should not be missed. The picture of goats chomping through the blackberries on a Queen Anne slope, only to have the hill slide into someone else’s yard, is just delicious!” Maria Semple’s novel seems a straightforward Seattle book – but the city holds its surprises, as our readers proved. If you’re after the best travel companions for a visit, or just to know more about the city, here is a reading list from our readers’ suggestions – and do check Ryan Boudinot’s introduction to the Pacific Northwest city’s literature from last week.

Finally made it to Seattle for the first time last autumn and, as I had long suspected, absolutely loved the place. Kind of town I could happily move to tomorrow. Surely you meant to include David Guterson in this list, though? I found the stories of Japanese-American civilians from the second world war period really moving (go to Bainbridge Island if you can) and Snow Falling On Cedars is a beautiful book.

To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher “reality” of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.

Waxwings captures the contemporary tech boomtown feel of the place in a desperate way that Where’d You Go Bernadette? can only name-droppingly grasp at

Waxwings contains more descriptive material about Seattle than does [his] Passage to Juneau. To a certain extent they cover the same marital problems but there are also subplots about the tech industry and immigration. And in spite of all these themes crowding into one book, there is a considerable narrative tension – bordering on a page-turner.

Visitors from London and New York might think his affection for this city is a pose, but Tom was happy in Seattle, whose ambiguities suited him perfectly. It wasn’t all that big, but it wasn’t all that little, either. Though gratifyingly remote – the Pacific Northwest was something like America’s own Outer Hebrides – it was also central to the big world in ways that made London, at least, seem provincial, to borrow Scott-Rice’s tiresome word for Seattle.

Unlike most American cities that Tom knew, there was a ‘here’ here, where herring gulls were a traffic hazard and all streets led down to the water, where the older buildings pursued a guileless infatuation with the architecture of Ancient Rome, and ungovernable greenery – bramble, vine, salal – rose up defiantly from every crevice and scrap of waste ground, as if to strangle the city fathers’ vain Roman ambitions.

A rift in the speeding clouds revealed the young moon, hazy and tarnished above the wide blackness of the bay. At this hour, the streets of Seattle belonged to the poor, who trudged in ones and twos, hunched against the weather.

As a Seattle native (who once thumbed a ride in the San Juan Islands with Tom Robbins), I want to add a name to the list of Seattle literary luminaries. Michael Byers, now based in Ann Arbor, is a writer deeply rooted in Seattle, where he was raised, a product of Seattle public schools and pre-tech-boom Capitol Hill. His luminous novel Long for this World captures something essential about the city and its transformation by the tech explosion of the 1990s. His earlier collection of short stories, The Coast of Good Intentions, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. I may be biased (having grown up with him), but I think he is one of the hidden gems of contemporary American fiction, and a jewel in Seattle’s mossy literary crown.

Six hours to fly to Seattle, and it was all, she had to keep reminding herself, the same country – Ronald Reagan was the president of that lake and that little circular set of fields and that butterfly highway exchange and all these clouds and all the mountains too.

Jim Lynch’s The Highest Tide is set in Olympia [a town 60 miles from Seattle] and is fantastic; I believe it did better in the UK than in the US but who cares. […] The cover art alone of Truth Like the Sun should put it onto the list.

I too miss the quiet Seattle of yesteryear […] but we can’t keep this place in curls and a Buster Brown suit much longer.

‘Let the fair begin!’ Kennedy commands. The Space Needle carillon clangs 538 bells, and two thousand ‘See you in Seattle’ balloons rise into the clearing sky. Then the freak show really begins.

The capital of the new world economy! And the locals swallowed all these national rankings and blather, even during this current dotcom hangover. ‘Just look!’ they told her, as if the views alone justified the hype. Seattle reminded her of men she’d known who’d been told too many times how handsome they were.

I am beginning to believe that nothing is quite so uncertain as facts.

By 1900, the tribes owned less than 2 per cent of the land they once possessed. Entire languages had already disappeared – more than a loss of words, a loss of a way to look at the world.

In Invisible Monsters, the main characters travel to Seattle where they contemplate the 1962 World’s Fair and all the disappointments the future had to offer. They throw postcards from the Space Needle with messages to the future. It is heartbreaking and beautiful.

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.

You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it’s just teeth.

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Game of Thrones and the art of rhetorical gift-giving

What did the leader of the Spanish party Podemos mean by giving a box set of George RR Martin’s regicidal series to the king of Spain? And which other books would you choose to deliver a political message?

Nice as it is to be given a present, have you ever had the feeling somebody is dropping you a bit of a hint with the volume selected?

Such ungrateful thinking might perhaps have occurred to Felipe VI, who succeeded Juan Carlos to the Spanish throne last year, with the gift he received from Pablo Iglesias at the European parliament on Wednesday. Iglesias, who leads the radical anti-austerity party Podemos, chose to give the monarch four box sets of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Everybody loves George RR Martin these days, of course, and according to the Washington Post the king pronounced himself delighted: “That’s great, I haven’t seen it.”

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A timeless voice against prejudice: your videos reading Anne Frank

Readers around the world have been recording one-minute readings of Anne Frank’s diary as part of the #NotSilent campaign – here are some of them

#NotSilent: social media campaign remembers Anne Frank

To mark the 70th anniversary of Anne Frank’s death, readers have been celebrating her life and her words against prejudice – which are as necessary as they’ve ever been – in a rather unusual manner: instead of holding a minute of silence, they’ve been recording themselves reading aloud her diary for 60 seconds, and posting on social media with the hashtag #NotSilent. Here are some of our favourite videos that readers have posted online – including some from authors, actors and other celebrities.

Actor Naomie Harris read:

Joining #notsilent today,very proud of Olivia reading her favourite Anne Frank excerpt in support of @AnneFrankTrust pic.twitter.com/CTvY8PzNzc

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