The Guardian's Blog, page 77
February 19, 2015
A brief survey of the short story: John Updike
• More from Chris Power’s A brief survey of the short story
In his 1960 story, The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island, John Updike’s narrator expresses the challenge of capturing life in words. “[W]e would-be novelists have a reach as shallow as our skins,” he writes. “We walk through volumes of the unexpressed and like snails leave behind a faint thread excreted out of ourselves. From the dew of the few flakes that melt on our faces we cannot reconstruct the snowstorm.” In a lecture given 16 years later, Updike described himself as a person “whose chemistry must daily secrete a written page or two”, and the expression of writing as a natural process was wholly appropriate: for him, living was writing. In fact, the thread he secreted was enormous: 63 books in 50 years, including more than 20 novels and more than a dozen short-story collections.
William Maxwell, Updike’s first editor at the New Yorker, described him as a “conspicuously autobiographical writer”, a trait that, coupled with his longevity and prolificacy, gives his complete works the shape of an entire life. Teenage narrators in semi-rural Pennsylvania give way to young professionals in New York, marital strain, the death of parents, child-rearing and adultery in suburban Massachusetts, ageing and affluence, wistful longing for the energies of youth and, finally, an obsessive return to one’s beginnings (half of the stories in the posthumous collection My Father’s Tears are set in Olinger, Updike’s fictional version of his childhood home).
Related: Updike review – Adam Begley has written an 'exemplary biography
He was aware of his mother and himself, laying each in bed, as survivors of a larger party that had once occupied this house. It was as if, on a snowy pass, they had killed and eaten the others, and now one of the two remaining must perish next.
In the morning, to my relief, you are ugly. Monday’s wan breakfast light bleaches you blotchily, drains the goodness from your thickness, makes the bathrobe a limp stained tube flapping disconsolately, exposing sallow décolletage. The skin between your breasts a sad yellow. I feast with the coffee on your drabness. Every wrinkle and sickly tint a relief and a revenge. The children yammer. The toaster sticks. Seven years have worn this woman.
Related: Top 10 John Updike short stories
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Not my words: John Green's wrongly attributed line and other misquotes
As The Fault in our Stars author takes to YouTube to to reveal that one of his often quoted inspirational sentences wasn’t written by him, we look at some other famous victims of misquotation
“I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met.” So said John Green - only he didn’t. The author of last year’s top-selling novel, The Fault in Our Stars, explained in his YouTube series vlogbrothers that these words, often quoted as part of his book Paper Towns, were in fact written by a young blogger:
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.”
Let them eat cake.”
I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”
The ends justify the means.”
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Standing in the shoulders of giants”.
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Comic-book heroes deserve better than a trashing
The long history, abundant diversity and visionary quality of comics produced in the English-speaking world are too rarely appreciated by mainstream critics
Related: When did the comic-book universe become so banal?
When pop culture icons burst from the underground, critical commentators tend to cocoon themselves in snobbery or flail around trying to understand their significance. This week, the Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones joined in with a blogpost titled: “When did the comic-book universe become so banal?”
Related: Comics studies has been undervalued for too long: we're fighting to change this
Related: The Last Saturday, by Chris Ware
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February 18, 2015
Caribou Island: a frontier too far
Though inspired by a long tradition of American rural writing, David Vann’s novel rejects the romance of the wild
You don’t need me to tell you that the frontier looms large in the American imagination - not least because David Vann has already spoken to The White Review about the call of the wild:
“Forge your own paths, build cabins, hammer it out in the wilderness, clear trees – that’s somehow part of the American imagination – that’s who we are and Alaska is our final frontier. I think the whole nation imagines it.”
“I am inspired by the American tradition of rural writing, authors such as William Faulkner, Annie Proulx and Toni Morrison. A whole bunch of my favourite authors wrote about these rural landscapes in America. I actually think that’s the best kind of American writing. The longer tradition of American writing is actually rural and I think we forget that. I think for people to think that it’s the urban novel set in New York is a really skewed view.”
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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.
SharonE6 praised Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda:
Just my kind of book – beautifully written with characters I care about. It’s quite heartbreaking. I also love the feel of the paper and the cover (it’s the paperback version). It makes reading a really pleasurable experience. I think I’ll judge this as a worthy Booker winner and I’ll definitely be reading more by Carey.
Just (as in literally, on-the-bus-home just) finished Bring Up The Bodies and really, really enjoyed it. As I said on last week’s thread the world Mantel creates is so rich and so completely immersive that you want to stay in it forever, even as it all rolls towards the inevitable. It’s also been really interesting to see the shift in Cromwell that comes all at once, and yet you suddenly realise it’s been building up all along. Utterly, utterly brilliant.
Recently I found out about Irish slavery in the Caribbean and I have had to find out all about it. To Hell or Barbados is not an easy book to start on, however it is incredibly informative and you really feel for those who were involved in such a brutal time. Not only does he describe what it was to be Irish but also an African slave who lived among the Irish on the plantations, which makes you piece together parts of African American slave history too.
I’m now halfway through the book and keep it with me so I can have a sneak peek whenever I get the chance. It has opened my mind up to a part of history I regretfully say is not taught in school. Sean O’ Callaghan really grips your attention with this fact-based interpretation of history.
My heart always sinks when the character in one novel clings to another novel. On previous experience: the greater the literary pretensions of a main character, the lesser the literary quality of the book.
An interesting comment, which got me thinking back to fiction I’ve read in which characters are reading other books. I can’t really think of any where such reading gave a character literary pretensions which I felt was supposed to gain my admiration. Some examples that come to mind:
Lighting up the shelves with the rainbow treatment. More than half of them are still unread ... Let’s get cracking.
Almost finished Popco by Scarlett Thomas, a writer who is underrated and little celebrated. The absorbing story concerns Alice, an appealing and complicated heroine, who works at Popco, a toy company, developing new products. The book is crammed with interest – maths, code breaking, Pirates, homeopathy to mention but a few. It explores globalisation, gender issues, love, family and friendship. It has the most vivid portrait of teenage group dynamics I’ve read since Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. It was written in the early’90s so it’s interesting to see how technology and social media have developed since then. A wonderful read.
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February 16, 2015
Which is your favourite book cover?
As we approach a million followers on Twitter, we’re celebrating with a series on our favourite books. Now it’s time for great and interesting book cover designs (among all the books you own). Here are some of our favourites among the pictures you shared with us. What are yours? Let us know in the comments or on the hashtag #booksamillion
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February 13, 2015
Rex appeal: the literary attraction of dinosaur erotica
From girl-on-centaur to guy-on-pterodactyl action, the fiction genre of monster porn is more sex-positive than Fifty Shades – and pervier, too
Forget Anastasia and Christian. Nothing says Valentine’s Day like dinosaur porn. What’s not to like? It’s so much more fun than Fifty Shades, more sex-positive – and much pervier. With short stories including Taken by the T-Rex, Ravished by Triceratops and In the Velociraptor’s Nest, it takes dinomania to a whole new level, while also possibly answering the question “why did dinosaurs become extinct”? (Interspecies confusion.)
Why go to all the bother of taming the monster inside Christian Grey when – since it’s all imaginary anyway – you could get it on with an actual monster? It’s part of a larger genre of “monster erotica”, which also includes girl-on-centaur, girl-on-satyr and guy-on-pterodactyl action (in Pterodactyl Turned Me Gay, a title surely beloved of the Christian right and containing the immortal line: “I was covered from head to toe with the pterodactyl cum”). Dino erotica sits comfortably in the context of Greek mythology, where interspecies mingling was quite the thing. And don’t forget that EL James’s work began its life as fan fiction for Twilight, which was girl-on-vampire. Monsters, all.
Related: Signior Dildo – and other perfect poems for Valentine’s Day
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February 12, 2015
What's your favourite place to read?
As we approach a million followers on Twitter, we’re celebrating with a series on our favourite books and other literature-related topics. Our third topic was our favourite places to read, and here are some of the best – minus the places you deemed best not to share on social media. Want to add yours? Do it in the comments or on the hashtag #booksamillion. Now time to get cosy and bundle up with a good read ...
Follow the #booksamillion conversation on Twitter, with new topics every dayThe first book you remember readingThe best book you’ve ever been givenYour favourite classic booksContinue reading...
Signior Dildo – and other perfect poems for Valentine’s Day
If you are looking for conventional love poetry for Valentine’s Day, the verse of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, might not be your best bet. Any man who wrote a poem called Against Constancy is never going to subscribe to hearts-and-flowers romance. A leading figure of the Restoration court – its “blazing star”, if you will – Rochester lived out his life like a mixture of rock-star and prophet, piercing the glittering facade of the world he inhabited and exposing in his poetry the dirt and depravity behind. Dying cruelly young at 33, he deprived England, and its literature, of one of its brightest lights. He has gone on to enjoy a remarkable afterlife, being played by Johnny Depp and featured in a song by Nick Cave, but his writing has resisted all attempts to pin it down, and continues to provoke and delight more than three centuries after his death in 1680.
For many, it comes as a shock to read Rochester’s poems for the first time. Four-letter words are gaily scattered about in a manner sure to offend the prudish, and the force of the sexual and scatological imagery to be found in his writing means that preconceptions of what poetry – especially Restoration poetry – “should” be are challenged. Poems such as his bawdy social satire Signior Dildo, the chillingly misanthropic A Ramble in St James’s Park, and his brilliant meditation on premature ejaculation The Imperfect Enjoyment are strong stuff, even today; no wonder that his work was sold as pornography until the middle of the 20th century. But then again, what else can you say about a man who said of himself, in Upon His Drinking a Bowl:
Cupid and Bacchus my saints are,
May drink and love still reign!
With wine I wash away my cares,
And then to cunt again.
All my past life is mine no more,
The flying hours are gone,
Like transitory dreams giv’n o’er,
Whose images are kept in store
By memory alone.
The time that is to come is not;
How can it then be mine?
The present moment’s all my lot;
And that, as fast as it is got,
Phyllis, is only thine.
February 11, 2015
Straight from the heart: the best love letters
Valentine’s Day is coming, and with it a poll to identify the greatest ever love letters. Here’s our alternative list, but which epistle would you nominate?
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, life insurance company Beagle Street has polled 1,000 people to find the “greatest love letters ever written”. Their list - entirely composed, incidentally, of letters by men, to women - is topped by Johnny Cash’s note to his wife, June Carter, on her 65th birthday.
Cash’s words are sweet, and heartfelt:
“We get old and get use to each other. We think alike. We read each other’s minds. We know what the other wants without asking. Sometimes we irritate each other a little bit. Maybe sometimes take each other for granted. But once in awhile, like today, I meditate on it and realize how lucky I am to share my life with the greatest woman I ever met.”
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