SALMAN RUSHDIE READING THE REMAINS OF THE DAY

Click here to read the Guardian article I told you about: Salman Rushdie reading Ishiguro’s beautiful but also cruel novel. Here you have a hint:

The real story here is that of a man destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life. Stevens is much preoccupied by "greatness", which, for him, means something very like restraint. The greatness of the British landscape lies, he believes, in its lack of the "unseemly demonstrativeness" of African and American scenery. It was his father, also a butler, who epitomised this idea of greatness; yet it was just this notion which stood between father and son, breeding deep resentments and an inarticulacy of the emotions that destroyed their love.

The Guardian, Friday 17 August 2012

This is the passage from the novel Rushdie is referring to:

The English landscape at its finest - as I saw it this morning- possesses a quality that the landscapes of other nations, however superficially more dramatic, fail to possess …and this quality is best summed up by the term “greatness”…it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint… the whole question is very akin to the question that has caused so much debate in our profession over the years: what is a “great” butler? 

A question formulated when little remains of the profession ...

VIDEOTELLING & PICTURETELLING

We've talked about STORYTELLING before, either during our book club sessions or even here in our blog. However, have you ever heard about PICTURETELLING or VIDEOTELLING?

You can see Jamie Keddie, who we had the pleasure of seeing and hearing in Pamplona, doing some "videotelling".

 What do you think? Do you think you'd enjoy being a student in this class?

In any case, we do picturetelling and videotelling all the time. Think about all those times you tell a friend about a photo you saw on Facebook or a video you saw on the internet. Can you do it in English, though?

I propose a challenge: Go to The Guardian section "In Pictures" and choose one of the images there. Try to describe it for a classmate, friend, partner, giving them clues about the picture/video. If it is a picture, it would be fun to ask the other person to draw the image they have in mind.

Example:

Afterwards, debate and see if their mental image actually matched the real thing or not.

It's really fun!!

Check Jamie Keddie's  blog here (lots of good stuff to study English).

Philip Roth: Greatest Living US Writer?

Read Philip Roth? You might want to jump on the bandwagon because he has recently been voted the greatest US Writer by a panel of 30 literati, that is, would be experts like Salman Rushdie. Possible Nobel Prize? Suggestions: why not try The Ghost Writer? Adapted from article in The Guardian and suggestions from The Daily Beast.

LET'S PUT A LITTLE LOVE IN OUR BLOG

Over 100 entries and not even one about love??? This cannot continue so and here goes my post on love and literature.

Here's a link to an article in The Guardian about a bestseller in Amazon by Hilary Boyd (by the way, did you know the term "gran-lit"?) dealing with romance between 60-somethings.

And here's another one which is good news for all those of you that voted for Bridget Jones's Diary, because it seems Helen Fielding has announced she is writing a 3rd novel about Britain's favourite singleton, due out next autumn. As for me, I confess I am praying that book does not get chosen - yeap, sorry, not my cup of tea :) Hey, needless to say, I'll read it if it gets chosen!

CAN PAPER SURVIVE THE DIGITAL AGE?

We've discussed this topic repeatedly in our class, right? However, it is a hot topic and articles continue to be published about it.

Here's another one published recently in The Guardian.

I love the idea that "paper is our second skin" (it is for me despite all these new technological gadgets) and also the strong link between paper and art:

"For better and for worse, paper remains our absolute all-time favourite self-extending prosthetic technology and device. It enables and represents the best of us, and the worst. Take art, for example. Of course, not all art takes place on paper. And not all art on paper is paper art. And some paper art may not be everyone's idea of art at all. Anyone for Lucio Fontana's paper-piercings? Or Gordon Matta Clark's paper slits and cuts? Joe Good's pellet-peppered paper? Martin Creed's Work No 88, A Sheet of A4 Paper, Crumpled Up Into a Ball (1994)? Or – my favourite, a masterpiece of its kind – Tom Friedman's 1000 Hours of Staring (1992-1997), stare on paper, 32½ins x 32½ ins, which is simply a plain white piece of paper that has been stared at. For a long time. But these are only the more obvious examples of the role of paper in art. It's possible to argue that the development of all modern art derives from what the critic Clement Greenberg called the "pasted-paper revolution". The use of paper collage in the early 20th century, according to Greenberg, liberated art from being merely decorative, an illustration of reality."

I AM PLEASED TO INTRODUCE...

I am thrilled that this is the first book we are going to read!

 The three of us, Ana, Paul and myself, hope you ENJOY reading it and that it makes you think about a lot of different issues. 

To whet your appetite, here is a series of links related to the book:

A podcast where Lionel Shriver discusses some aspects of the book and its story.

An article where Lionel Shriver (she's actually a woman, I was surprised!) discusses the difficulties she faced to get her book published.

A review. And here's the way it opens (which I love and it also provides a fair warning!): 

"If you are already a parent, this book will make you count your blessings but if you have yet to become one, beware…this book will scare the hell out of you and could quite possibly reduce your egg/sperm supply just by reading it"

ALAN BENNETT "I've often wanted to be bolder"

You know how I was telling you about Smut? Here's a comment taken from an interview published in the Guardian (click here to read it) where he talks about one of the stories published in the book.

Never more so than in the beautiful and filthy short story, The Greening of Mrs Donaldson, written for a recent edition of the London Review of Books. Mrs Donaldson, a widow in her late 50s, has a part-time job at a medical school acting out cases to the students to test their diagnostic skills. She takes in two students as lodgers, and when they run short of rent money they suggest a lubricious transaction that involves voyeurism, a threesome of sorts and sado-masochism.

LOST DAPHNE DU MAURIER STORIES FOUND

Bookseller unearths five early Daphne du Maurier tales including a risqué short story entitled 'The Doll'.

A bookseller's dedicated attempts to root out the early work of Daphne du Maurier have resulted in the recovery of five lost tales by the enduringly popular author of Rebecca and Jamaica Inn. Most startling among them is "The Doll", published in 1928 when Du Maurier was barely into her 20s – a macabre short story about a man who discovers that the girl he's smitten with is besotted with a mechanical sex doll.

Read the whole story HERE.