The Guardian's Blog, page 72
March 26, 2015
Reading American cities: books about New Orleans
To mark the Tennessee Williams New Orleans literary festival, Susan Larson walks us through the essential literature to understand the city – from classics to accounts of life after Katrina
Welcome to the land of dreamy dreams and harsh realities that is New Orleans. Books and films have given readers a longtime familiarity with its great neighborhoods and its distinctive culture, which play out on city streets – especially in the elaborate costumes of Mardi Gras. Most New Orleanians, old line or recently arrived, know the drama of Stanley and Stella, the elegance of the Vampire Lestat and his friends, the aromatic hot dog cart of Ignatius Reilly, and the determined search of Binx Bolling. The streets beckon the flaneur in all of us. Writers like Richard Ford and Barry Gifford have drifted in and out of New Orleans over the years; natives Walter Isaacson, Michael Lewis and Anne Rice have become fixtures on the bestseller lists. And the literary heritage of one of the country’s great cities grows with new arrivals every year.
Stella, from A Streetcar Named Desire, seems to linger on every Quarter balcony
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The many versions of Richard III: from Shakespeare to Game of Thrones
Writers have been plundering the last Plantagenet king for varied ends over more than 400 years, his likeness turning up in fantasy, comedy and political thrillers
Figuratively speaking, writers have been digging up Richard III and setting what they make of him before the public for more than four centuries. While some were inspired by the play Shakespeare wrote 100 years after Richard’s death, others have been drawn to the historical figure, who was reburied in Leicester this morning.
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Taylor Swift’s grammar marked down incorrectly
The Princeton Review has sniffed at the (misheard) lyrics of the pop star’s song Fifteen. But its ‘correction’ is more than five centuries out of date
One of the reliable pleasures of observing modern arguments over language is the schadenfreude of seeing the self-appointed prescriptive grammarians get things embarrassingly wrong. So it has turned out again, with the culprit this time being the Princeton Review (which helps US students prepare for college admission tests), and the people’s champion being none other than pop empress Taylor Swift.
In a Princeton test paper, a section headed “Grammar in Real Life” told students: “Pop lyrics are a great source of bad grammar. See if you can find the error in each of the following.” Taylor Swift’s song Fifteen was then cited as containing the line “Somebody tells you they love you, you got to believe ’em.” A fan posted her sad reaction online: “I was just having an amazing time studying for the SAT and now I feel attacked.” Then Swift herself responded on Tumblr: “Not the right lyrics at all pssshhhh. You had one job, test people. One job.”
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March 25, 2015
Wielding the pen: US war veterans' writing programs thrive across country
Words After War and other workshops from New York to DC encourage veterans to develop writer’s voice as form of catharsis – but also for civilian engagement
An Afghan woman heaves a pot of chickpeas into the yard outside her home and balances it on a makeshift fire fed with precious scraps of cardboard. The American soldiers who are stationed nearby keep their distance behind sandbag barricades, watching and waiting, occasionally tossing candy to the children. The woman can see her adolescent son and his friends scuffling in a nearby alley. When their play turns suddenly violent, she is gripped by fear of what he might become, in this world without peaceful choices. “He would be a leader,” she thinks, “but of what?”
Tense and laden with the kind of detail that can only come from close observation, this scene is part of a short story by Kristen L Rouse, a Brooklyn writer and veterans’ advocate who served three tours in Afghanistan. Rouse was one of 11 readers who presented their work on a recent rainy Saturday afternoon at the headquarters of New York University’s creative writing program.
Related: Phil Klay: 'If I was to write about war, I couldn't go halfway'
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March 24, 2015
Baddies in books: DS Bruce Robertson in Irvine Welsh’s Filth
The bent copper is Welsh’s darkest character, but beneath the sadistic surface, there’s a squirming sense of conflict – and it’s a consequence of his past as much as his talking tapeworm
Forget James McAvoy and those redemptive to-camera monologues. The literary version of Irvine Welsh’s DS Bruce Robertson is so slimy and poisonous even Attenborough (David, not Richard) wouldn’t handle him. A middle-aged caveman sustained by Kit-Kats and prejudice, with galloping eczema around his nether regions and trousers so shiny you could do your makeup in them, “Robbo” is an old-school copper bent on promotion. And, boy, don’t we just love him.
Officers today still tell Irvine Welsh: “We all know a Robbo,” when he signs their copies of Filth. That means in every station, there’s a wiffy psychopath who wants to turn your noise complaint into a sex-crime confession. This is just one of the tricks the dirty DS pulls while pounding the streets of Edinburgh in 1997.
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March 23, 2015
Books about Los Angeles: readers' picks
From LA noir to 21st-century satire, the literature of this Californian city embraces extremes of wealth, fame, frustration and failure. Here’s a selection of our readers’ suggestions of books to bring you closer to the city of Angels
Did you miss last week’s blog about Los Angeles in books? Catch up hereIdealised for its sun, glamour and free-minded spirit of possibility, Los Angeles also has a dark side – and it’s fascinating how writers have depicted the contrasts and culture clashes that abound in it. As The New York Times said of Mike Davis’s myth-busting City of Quartz, if this is hell, why is it so popular? Last week, Kate Gale blogged about some of the essential literary works set in LA, and our readers had a lot to add. Here are some of their recommendations:
City of Quartz is a fantastic and infuriating read, a brutal and lively account of a city and its endless suburbs produced by real estate speculation and conflicts between elites. Although he updated it to take the story up to the riots of the early 90s, there isn’t yet an edition bringing the story up to the present day, unfortunately (as far as I know). A shame, as the city and its surroundings have continued to undergone massive changes, and to be sclerotic and scintillating at the same time: congested freeways, massive real estate price inflation, absurd wealth on one side of the city and deprivation on the other, racial conflict and exhilarating cultural hybridity.
If you’re talking essential reading for LA, it has to be City of Quartz: it tells the full gritty, sordid story from the early days up through the 1990s. You’ll never look at LA the same way again.
LA is inevitably a writer’s “paradise” or haven, as it integrates the necessary stage set ... Half the time it is like living and driving on a set. I was fortunate to live there for a couple of years. When I left, a friend of mine gave me a gift, Bret Easton Ellis’s The Informers – it encapsulated perfectly my memories and thoughts about LA. It comprises of short stories of various persons who are closely and quite loosely connected. Written in distinctive Ellis style it is as putting a knife to the bone, inhumanely precise and true of what most people experience of living in LA, where car culture and massive distances can put a distance to fellow human beings. A must read!
Greed is good. Sex is easy. Youth is forever. —The Informers
I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is ‘Disappear Here’ and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light. —Less Than Zero
Ellroy owns that entire LA noir sub-genre. Not to be underestimated is his autobiographic essay, My Dark Places, which is an unprecedentedly horrific first person narration about growing up in LA’s seamier – and potently dangerous – environs.
My Dark Places is disturbing but quite brilliant, and incredibly honest. He’s a legend – but his life could’ve went so many other ways, don’t you think?
I think I’d actually be disappointed if I went to LA and it wasn’t the sweaty, sleazy glamour, floating precariously over and regularly taking a swim in a river of sin that Ellroy paints.
Ellroy hands down. His descriptions of LA are so visceral, I half expect to see Dudley Smith appear out of nowhere from an alley.
Ellroy owns the entire LA noir sub-genre
Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.
I wanted to go home. I wanted to see Helen. I wanted to write this memoir. Dead women were holding me back. They died in L.A. and told me to stick around for a while. I was burned out on detective work.
I split L.A. in ‘81. Ir was too familiar and too easy. AA was too easy. I wanted to ditch all the people hooked on therapy and 12-step religion. I knew I could stay sober anywhere. I wanted to blast out of L.A. and limit my L.A. intake to the fictional L.A. in my head.
Ah, Los Angeles! Dust and fog of your lonely streets, I am no longer lonely. Just you wait, all of you ghosts of this room, just you wait, because it will happen, as sure as there’s a God in heaven.
I have wanted women whose very shoes are worth all I have ever possessed.
Come down out of the skies, you God, come on down and I’ll hammer your face all over the city of Los Angeles, you miserable unpardonable prankster. If it wasn’t for you, this woman would not have been so maimed, and neither would the world.
Grew up in LA, have still a love/hate relationship ... For me, no one chronicles the realities (there are so many) of Los Angeles as well as Michael Connelly. Any of his books take me instantly back to those crazy dirty Hollywood streets, those downtown LA tall buildings and silent, staring street characters ... The melting pot that simmered in the hot California sun ...
Nothing like him, before or since, his prose is so evocative I can feel myself sweating when I read his work, even in a brutal Canadian winter.
The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers’ bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story. —The Black Echo
It took me months to get it out of my head. Illegal immigrants’ lives intersect with those living in horrible LA gated communities. The tragedy of life in the USA as it is lived by some.
There are always surprises. Life may be inveterately grim and the surprises disproportionately unpleasant, but it would be hardly worth living if there were no exceptions, no sunny days, no acts of random kindness.
Ross Macdonald is my favourite LA noir type writer ... though many of his books are set farther up the coast. The Way Some People Die is a great one and starts out in LA. His prose is just so good, wiry and athletic, it feels like it’s jumping off the page; or like it might be able to give you a black eye.
Behind the semi-elliptical bar four cowboys who had never been near a cow sang western songs which sounded as if they had originated in the far east. —The Underground Man
Driving a Bentley to Target – only in LA does this make sense.
We’re all good when we want to be, otherwise we’re fucking animals. There is no VIP room in reality, and there is no reality in this city. You can’t Google the answers. People talk about being on the ride of your life – THIS IS YOUR LIFE.
Evelyn Waugh snarls at the hypocrisy and ridiculousness of the American Dream and the Brits who try to maintain the pomp of their diminished homeland. A jolly good film adaptation too (monstrous Mr Joyboy) which is nice for a story that features the movies.
Outside the windows the cars swept past continuously, out of town, into town, lights ablaze, radios at full throttle. “I wither slowly in thine arms,” he read. “Here at the quiet limit of the world,” and repeated to himself: “Here at the quiet limit of the world. Here at the quiet limit of the world”… as a monk will repeat a simple pregnant text, over and over again in prayer.
This seemed to be happening more and more lately out in Greater Los Angeles, among gatherings of carefree youth and happy dopers, where Doc had begun to notice older men, there and not there, rigid, unsmiling, that he knew he’d seen before, not the faces necessarily but a defiant posture, an unwillingness to blur out, like everyone else at the psychedelic events of those days, beyond official envelopes of skin.
It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadn’t been smoking much and it wasn’t headlights – but before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety.
Yet after night fall most any layover here, it seemed that they ended up cruising the bleak arterials of dismal L.A. backwaters, seeking out of some helpless fatality the company of lowlifes of opportunity.
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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 blogsWelcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
daylightsimulator shared:
It’s taken me three weeks to get to page 174 of Elizabeth Bowen’s second world war novel In the Heat of the Day. Its endless ambiguity makes it the most putdownable book I’ve ever read. It’s impossible to read more than twenty pages without a kind of mental peasouper descending (the fog of war?). The phrase “or rather” seems to follow every observation or thought. There are more commas on one page than in Cormac McCarthy’s entire oeuvre. This doesn’t mean I’m not enjoying it. On the contrary, it’s a treat to see how a writer can evoke and sustain a feeling of limitless opacity. I think this book was popular at the time it was published, but can imagine it would get little public interest today.
It deserves all the plaudits it has received. It’s one of those occasions when a wildly experimental form just works. It’s written in short separated paragraphs; tiny vignettes, asides and quotes from other writers, depicting a relationship in crisis. It’s extraordinarily funny in places, and moving in others. Although it is so fragmentary, each seemingly random observation builds on the last, and it really does feel like you’ve read something wholly original.
I watched The Grand Budapest Hotel just before Christmas, and Zweig went back on my reading list as a result. This is my first attempt at Zweig (and my first post on this blog!), and I’m really enjoying it. A faux pas by an Austrian cavalry officer leads to him becoming entangled with the local nobility.
I’m interspersing this with The Global Minotaur (by the Greek finance minister Y Varouflakis) as well as the 80p Penguin little black classic of Circles of Hell (extract of Dante’s Inferno). I’d highly recommend The Global Minotaur. A book to make one think (whether or not you agree with Varouflakis!).
I first picked the book up about three years ago, but gave up fairly quickly. This time I began it on the beach, which meant more time to persevere and I am so glad I did. Somewhere around page 200 the strands began to come together and it became one helluva good read. Yes, it’s a little wordy, but they’re really good words. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes long reads and doesn’t mind working a little bit for their entertainment!
well, I've almost finished Lucy Hughes-Hallett's 'The Pike', a really fascinating account of the life Gabriele D'Annunzio, what a nutter! Also been dipping into H.V. Mortons 'A Traveller in Rome', so evocative, beautifully written. And as for the 1906 'Every Boys Book of British Natural History', well, it tells you how to build a camera for 14 shillings, then how to photograph wildlife with it, amazing!
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By ID8459116
18 March 2015, 23:05
There, amongst the shiny children’s books and DIY manuals, was an unexpected gem – Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, still a virgin with no stamps inside the cover. Joy. Just finished it and couldn’t do anything else but read it … Kids had defrosted and heated food, dishes remained unwashed, cats and dogs lost weight, husband turned into a reluctant au pair … Nothing came between me and sheets of Colorless. There is very little on this planet to compare to reading Murakami for the first time. [...] Burrowing into the mind of a Japanese 31 year old shy man and reading his thoughts, his paranoia and his hurt made me very happy. What strange creatures we are.
Found the 1972 Turkish edition of Straw Dogs in my library #WorldBookDay @GuardianBooks pic.twitter.com/GcH9wq7y3Z
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March 20, 2015
Kazuo Ishiguro and Caryl Phillips: a friendship 'paved with books'
The two authors discussed their long friendship and being the children of immigrants at readings in New York City
Kazuo Ishiguro’s nickname is not Kaz, as one may expect. Caz is the nickname of fellow author Caryl Phillips. Ishiguro is known as Ish. “I thought we needed some clarification,” Ishiguro told two audiences on Wednesday night in New York.
And while the opening of each talk was similar – the first with high school writers as part of the Unterberg Poetry Center’s Schools Project Program and the second at a bigger 92Y event – their more intimate conversation with the students about identity, memory and friendship became the evening’s highlight.
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How come the romantic novel of the year is a work of Young Adult fiction?
Julia Golding, who wrote YA title Struck under the pen name Joss Stirling, has won a prize normally taken by books written for grown ups. What’s going on?
For the past three years I’ve helped judge the romantic novel of the year award, selecting books such as Veronica Henry’s elegant Night on the Orient Express or Jenny Colgan’s delicious Welcome to Rosie Hopkin’s Sweetshop of Dreams – books that could not only be gobbled down in a matter of hours, but also really swept us off our feet.
This year’s winner had the intriguing countenance of some handsome stranger. Despite strong contenders from the adult side – including Lucy Dillon’s A Hundred Pieces of Me, and Lucy-Anne Holmes’s Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy – Julia Golding triumphed with her young adult novel Struck, written under the pen name Joss Stirling.
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It’s the postmodern experimentation of the New Testament that keeps it new
Writers should take heart from the chopped-up texts and genre mash-ups of the gospels – techniques proven to ensure a long literary shelf life
The gospels of the New Testament, compiled somewhere between AD50 and 110, get older every year. They also stay strikingly new, fuelled by a literary experimentalism that keeps them alive not as religious artefacts but as pieces of writing.
The Gospel of John stands apart, with no mention of the nativity or the breaking of bread at the last supper. But even though the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke share many of the same incidents, or “pericopes”, these short, self-contained passages appear in a different order in each one. In Matthew, the pericopes of the Sermon on the Mount, for example, are gathered together in a single block. In Luke, they’re separate. Each gospel is therefore a reworking of predetermined material for literary effect. Sound familiar?
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