Arts and Culture News

Mary Beard – A Don’s Life

Tourist hot-spots come in many different guises. Only a couple of weeks ago the queue to get into the Colosseum was about an hour and a half in length — and all to see the rather depressing ruins inside the building which are nothing compared with the splendid outside. (Tip: if you really want to see the Colosseum, go to one of the entrances to the Forum and buy the ticket there.. the queue is never so long.)

In Verona, where we finished our stint of filmimg yesterday (not the amphitheatre, in case you are wondering), the place to go is the “House of Juliet”, complete with balcony, as in Romeo and Juliet. There were no actual queues, but a tremendous, polyglot crush, even in mid December — made all the more democratic by the fact the view of the balcony and other bric-a-brac is free. You only have to pay if you want actually to go and stand on it, and to see the other Juliet memorabilia in the ‘museum’…. pride of place going to the bed that starred in Zefferellis version of Shakespeare’s play…..

The Times Online

Sam Anderson

I prepared for my first-ever trip to Japan, this summer, almost entirely by immersing myself in the work of Haruki Murakami. This turned out to be a horrible idea. Under the influence of Murakami, I arrived in Tokyo expecting Barcelona or Paris or Berlin — a cosmopolitan world capital whose straight-talking citizens were fluent not only in English but also in all the nooks and crannies of Western culture: jazz, theater, literature, sitcoms, film noir, opera, rock ’n’ roll. But this, as really anyone else in the world could have told you, is not what Japan is like at all. Japan — real, actual, visitable Japan — turned out to be intensely, inflexibly, unapologetically Japanese….

New York Times

An interview with Pico Iyer about his latest book, a memoir about his relationship with Greene’s work.

For nearly 25 years, Pico Iyer’s books and essays have examined the intimate cross-cultural fascinations, discoveries, and contradictions of an ever-shrinking world. Eloquent and at times deeply philosophical, his writing explores the personal and social complexities that arise not just from displacement, but from attachment as well.

Iyer’s newest book, The Man Within My Head, documents the author’s lifelong fascination with English writer Graham Greene, and “the power of art to make us feel human, to identify parts of ourselves we never otherwise could have articulated.” Journeying into Greene’s books—often amid physical sojourns in places like Cuba, Mexico, Ethiopia, Burma, and Sri Lanka—Iyer moves from reportage and criticism into a haunted and acutely personal examination of his own life. “It was a if, underneath the self I knew and was in public,” he writes, “there was another self, mysterious even to its owner, that lived beyond the grasp of explanation but would read Greene’s works as if they were a private diary.” Iyer spoke to The Atlantic by email from his home in Japan…..

The Atlantic

By Emily Rhodes

When a pale blue hardback first arrived in the bookshop last summer, a thin band of sepia photographs wrapped around its belly, I picked it up, intrigued and excited. ‘So this is the book’, I thought. Puzzled but rave reviews; quiet enquiries from a few discerning, curious customers; talk of ‘netsuke’ (a peculiar name for funny little Japanese objects I’d never heard of before) – all these threads of anticipation had been winding their way around the bookshop. And then, at last, there it was.

It seems I wasn’t the only one to buy a copy, read it, love it, and swiftly buy several more to give to friends. The Hare with Amber Eyes became a much-coveted ‘word-of-mouth’ hit, with sales reaching a stunning peak the week before Christmas. Now, with the added accolade of the Costa Biography Award (and being tipped for an overall win, when the prize is announced on 25th January), it looks like the book will stay glowing in the limelight in 2011…..

The Spectator

A literary historian argues that the author’s genius lies in the way she holds up a mirror to each generation.

Amanda Vickery

Her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, came out 200 years ago, but it could have been yesterday for Jane Austen‘s legions of fans.

At this year’s annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America, about 800 pilgrims travelled to Fort Worth, Texas, to worship the fiction. A cavalcade of readers, mainly women, mostly in full Regency costume, congregated for a joyous weekend of workshops and lectures, receptions and dinners, a costume parade (past ersatz saloons and Tex-Mex restaurants), crowned by a Regency ball. The bonnets carried all before them.

Top billing went to the screenwriter Andrew Davies, whose testosterone-fuelled Pride and Prejudice for BBC1 rebooted the franchise in 1995. The buildup to his keynote lecture, Mr Darcy’s Wet Shirt and Other Embarrassments, was tremendous. Four cinema screens beamed a montage of climactic moments from his Austen back catalogue to the full-throttle accompaniment of Puccini’s Nessun Dorma. Davies, a genial seventysomething, looked stunned by the fervour of his reception. “He’s our rock god!” panted one fan. “Do you think he knows what he’s done for us?” gasped another…..

The Guardian

Privacy Policy
On the public commodification of privacy.

We have no more privacy. That’s what we’re told; certainly it’s something we feel. Of course it’s been thrilling, for those of us with the means and the Internet, to be more connected to each other and the world than we could have ever imagined. We can correspond at lightening speed. Vast, seemingly infinite quantities of information — more than we ever knew existed, more than we know how to process — is available for our consumption at any hour of the day or night. Easy access to information promises astonishing convenience and comfort. Radical connectivity has also given us information that was previously hidden. What was once unknowable has been revealed: the secrets of medicine, rare ancient documents, R.E.M. lyrics. And all this information is still less thrilling than what we can now know about other people. Once, we might have been allowed to know the town where a celebrity lived or what she liked to eat for breakfast. The mere fact of a philandering celebrity’s philandering was news. Now, we can hear their whispers and sighs, have seen all their folds and wrinkles. Celebrities are not simply exposed — they are exposing themselves. The film critic Roger Ebert, who has thyroid cancer, uses his celebrity to reveal the most intimate details of his physical deterioration, the withering of his face and voice. The writer Tony Judt did the same before his death; the writer Christopher Hitchens does so now. In the past, we may have been privileged to read musings on death and illness from these celebrities in their own eloquent words. Now we can also watch their gasps on YouTube, can get instantaneous updates about surgical procedures and infections via tweets and pinggs. And even this is less interesting than what we feel we must tell about ourselves….

The Smart Set

A Point of View by Clive James: review

The Daily Telegraph

Reviewing Robin Robertson’s versions of Tomas Transtromer’s poems, The Deleted World, on January 26, 2007, Alan Brownjohn wrote:

“Robertson’s book, a bilingual edition, is an inspired sampling of key poems from seven of Transtromer’s eleven volumes, in effect a tribute for the Swede’s seventy-fifth birthday from a poet whose own landscapes approach those of Transtromer’s in their bleakness; appropriately this small selection follows Robertson’s recent publication of Swithering, his own third volume. That shows affinities with the Transtromer poems (see his “Entry”, or “Sea-Fret”) without betraying any debt to them.”

Two weeks later, on February 9, Robin Fulton accused Robert Robinson of borrowing “excessively” from Fulton’s own translations of Transtromer:

Sir, – Alan Brownjohn’s diplomatic review (January 26) of Robin Robertson’s versions of Tomas Transtromer’s The Deleted World (Enitharmon, Brownjohn’s own publisher) tiptoes round some of the problems of Robertson’s enterprise. An excessively large number of Robertson’s lines are identical to mine in my Transtromer translations (as published by Bloodaxe, and New Directions): elsewhere, wittingly or unwittingly, Robertson makes arbitrary changes to the Swedish, a language he does not seem to understand. His versions are neither dependable translations nor independent imitations: they show a cavalier disregard for Transtromer’s texts and I have yet to see a reviewer able or willing to say so…..

The Times Literary Supplement

Merlin Holland is Oscar Wilde’s grandson and the sole executor of his estate. He is the author of Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess, the first unabridged publication of the famous libel trial.

1. ‘Oscar’ is the best-known ‘Wilde’

True, but unfairly so. His father, Sir William, was a remarkable Dublin doctor whose medical work on the 1851 and 1861 censuses earned him his knighthood, and is still referred to today as essential source material for 19th century Irish history. Sir William also published important contributions to the study of Celtic antiquities and Irish folklore. Oscar’s mother, Jane, was a prominent Irish Nationalist and poet who was nearly imprisoned for her inflammatory anti-English writing in 1848. As Oscar would write from prison in 1897: “She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured not merely in literature, art, archaeology and science, but in the public history of my own country in its evolution as a nation.”

2. He was homosexual from his schooldays

This is most unlikely, to judge from his correspondence. He seems to have been infatuated with Florence Balcombe (who later married Bram Stoker) for two years until he left Oxford in 1878, and had previously flirted with other young women in Dublin. He married Constance Lloyd in 1884, swiftly had two children with her and, by his own account, was blissfully happy in the first few years of his marriage. His ‘conversion’ to homosexuality probably came about in 1886/7 with a young man who was to remain a lifelong friend, Robert Ross……

The Guardian

From The Waste Land to Jabberwocky, the poet picks his favourite writing from the ‘conversation between words and silence’

Philip Gross has written for radio and stage, 10 novels for young people, opera libretti and collaborations of all kinds, but he is best known as a poet. His collection The Water Table won the TS Eliot prize, the photographic collaboration I Spy Pinhole Eye (with Simon Denison) was Wales book of the year and Off Road To Everywhere won the CLPE award for children’s poetry. His new collection, Deep Field, has just been published by Bloodaxe.

“I’ve just got back from Friesland / Fryslân in the north of Holland, hearing a language spoken that is so close to English that it’s like looking at a face through a rain-drenched window. One good wipe, you feel, and you’d know them. Now I’m about to drive from south to north Wales, where two languages lie alongside each other, oil and water, mixed rather than merged. I don’t speak Welsh or West Frisian – no other language, in fact, well enough to dream or write a poem in it – but that ragged edge of language is familiar to me….

The Guardian

In July 2010, Hilde Hoogenboom, a professor of Russian literature at Arizona State University, sent an impassioned missive to Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, to protest the closure of the NYPL’s Slavic and Baltic division. It “was one of the best places to work in the world,” she wrote. Indeed, in the universe of Russian studies, the Slavic division was legendary. “I recall [it] as an agreeably dim sort of place, with a faintly reverential, almost cathedral-like ambience,” George Kennan said in 1987. Among its 750,000 items are the first book printed in Moscow, the “Anonymous” Gospels; a first edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace; and John Reed’s collection of broadsides and posters from the Russian Revolution. Trotsky and Nabokov toiled in the division’s reading room. Václav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev made visits of tribute……

The Nation

An evening of lamentations
We can only guess at what W.G. Sebald, or “Max” to his friends, would have gone on to write if he had not died unexpectedly in 2001, aged 57. He had been publishing works for only 13 years, and fame had come late. Yet his oeuvre, however small, seems unified and cohesive, preoccupied as it is with themes of loss, memory and the transience of all things. From his first novel to be published in English, “The Emigrants” in 1996, to his finest work, “Austerlitz”, which appeared the year of his death, he created strange, luminous pieces of fiction and poetry….

The Economist

A test, and some texts: Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?

When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r.

It was maybe an hour before midnight at the Avalon Nightclub in Chapel Hill, and the Miz was feeling nervous. I didn’t pick up on this at the time—I mean, I couldn’t tell. To me he looked like he’s always looked, like he’s looked since his debut season, back when I first fell in love with his antics: all bright-eyed and symmetrical-faced, fed on genetically modified corn, with the swollen, hairless torso of the aspiring professional wrestler he happened to be and a smile you could spot as Midwestern American in a blimp shot of a soccer stadium.
Late in 1998 or early in ’99—during the winter that straddled the two—I spent a night on and off the telephone with a person named John Fahey…….

The New Yorker

The New Yorker

New York Times