CULT AUTHOR JG BALLARD DIES AT 78

The author JG Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, passed away last 19 April in London after a long illness. James Graham Ballard (1930 – 2009) was an English novelist and short story writer who was one the most famous members of the science fiction New Wave movement.
His best-known novels are the controversial Crash (1973), an exploration of sexual fetishism connected to traffic accidents, and the autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984) based on his childhood in a Japanese prison camp in China during World War II.
Both books were adapted into films, by David Cronenberg and Stephen Spielberg.
His early novels include The Drowned World (1962), The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drought (1965) and The Crystal World (1966). These were followed by more experimental novels, such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975).
More recently he has published novels like Cocaine Nights (1996), shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award, Super-Cannes (2000), Commonwealth Writers Prize and Millennium People (2003), a tale of violent political protest and social change.
J. G. Ballard's last novel was Kingdom Come (2006). In 2008, his autobiography, Miracles of Life, was published.
His friend and fellow author, Iain Sinclair, said Ballard had developed into a major literary figure:
"He was one of the first to take up the whole idea of ecological catastrophe. He was fascinated by celebrity early on, the cult of the star and suicides of cars, motorways, edge lands of cities. All of these things he was one of the first to create almost a philosophy of. And I think as time has gone on, he's become a major, major figure."
His work had such a strong personality that the adjective "Ballardian" entered the language, defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments."

PROPERCIO

Un paseo reciente por los cañones del Ebro y Rudrón me llevó a leer esta inscripción en la pared de una casa en Valdelateja.

"Tú sola eres mi casa, Cintia,

tú sola mis padres;
tú, todos los instantes de mi dicha"

Recordaba poco de Propercio, apenas lo suficiente para situarlo en la poesía amorosa de la época de Augusto, y he decidido hacer un repaso rápido a base de algunas páginas de Internet.

Se sabe poco de la vida de este poeta latino aunque su nacimiento se sitúa alrededor del 45 a.C. en Asís y su muerte en el año 15 a.C. Estudió en Roma y participó en la vida social de la gran ciudad, aunque sin comprometerse en la vida pública. A los 19 años conoció a la cortesana Hostia, la Cynthia de una buena parte de sus elegías, con quien vivió una relación apasionada y tortuosa. Perteneció al círculo de Mecenas y quizás por ello apoya la política del Imperio públicamente a través de su cuarto libro, dedicado a celebrar la Roma de Augusto.

Entre otros documentos, me he encontrado con Las elegías de Propercio y sus lectores áureos
un estudio de Lía Schwartz Lerner, sobre la influencia de la poesía de Propercio en poetas posteriores, en especial Garcilaso, Herrera, Lope de Vega, Quevedo y Góngora. Curiosamente la autora introduce el tema a partir de una obra de teatro inglés contemporáneo, The Invention of Love, de Tom Stoppard, donde este dramaturgo reúne en escena al ensayista Walter Pater, el crítico de arte John Ruskin, el escritor Oscar Wilde, profesores de lenguas clásicas de la universidad de Oxford y varios periodistas y escritores contemporáneos de aquellos. Las siguientes citas dan idea de la presencia de Propercio en la obra:

“Su protagonista es el filólogo inglés Alfred E. Housman, que aparece desdoblado literalmente en dos personajes: un Housman ya muerto a los 77 años, al que se designa con sus iniciales: AEH, y el mismo Housman, cuando entre sus 18 y 26 años estudiaba en Oxford”.

“Cuando se inicia la obra, Housman está de pie en la ribera de la laguna Estigia esperando la llegada de la barca de Carón (…) En el acto I, Housman se enfrenta con su alter ego, que llega cargado de libros: son diversas ediciones de Propercio, que el joven alumno critica. Su intención es volver a editar las elegías, resolver los problemas de un texto corrupto que resultaba aun incomprensible en esos años. Gran parte del diálogo entre AEH y Housman gira en torno a cuestiones textuales o a los problemas que suscita la traducción de la poesía de Propercio, de Catulo o de otros autores latinos y griegos”.

“A pesar de este tema tan poco propicio en apariencia, la obra tuvo un éxito notable en Londres y en Nueva York. No poco debe haber contribuido a ello la dramatización de un caso de frustrado amor homosexual en la Inglaterra victoriana. Sin embargo, el texto de Stoppard es atrevidamente culto y está construido en torno a citas latinas y griegas que permiten también leerlo como reivindicación del valor e interés de la cultura clásica en estos tiempos que parecen serle tan hostiles”.

ALAN SILLITOE

Last week I attended some talks, readings and other events related to poetry within the programm of Cosmopoética in Córdoba. There, I had the opportunity to listen to Alan Sillitoe and his wife, Ruth Fainlight. Up until then I had little knowledge about Sillitoe, just an association of his name with the story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

When talking about his approach to poetry, he told us that he started to write due to an 18-month-long convalescence when hospitalised with tuberculosis at the age of 19. After that experience, he decided to read what he considered important such as the Bible or Shakespeare in order to fill a gap in his literary knowledge. He stressed the importance of reading previous to writing.

His first volume of poetry, Without Beer or Bread was published in 1957. He also published Poems (1971), with Ted Hughes and Ruth Fainlight, Storm and Other Poems (1974) and Barbarians and Other Poems (1973).

Regarding his fiction works, Alan Sillitoe is grouped among the "angry young men" of the 1950s, with John Osborne, John Braine, John Wain, Arnold Wesker, and Kingsley Amis.

Among some other few poems, he read ‘The Morse Machine’. A recording of that reading can be seen at the end of this video.

In fact, Sillitoe trained as a wireless operator in World War II and still practises taking Morse code.

“I keep up my skill with Morse by taking messages from the radio now and again. It's a kind of therapy. When I can't write I tap out a few words to get me going, or sometimes as a plea to the gods to send another poem or novel”

Extract from The Guardian

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Madrid

Francis Bacon is not the only opportunity the Museo del Prado is offering this season to those interested in British arts and culture.
In a smaller format, the exhibition Sleeping Beauty (open until 31 may of 2009), features seventeen works by major artists of Victorian Britain, a little represented school in Spanish museums. They have been lent by the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico.
The exhibition includes works by artists such as John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Coley Burne-Jones, dating from different phases of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais in an attempt to rediscover the authenticity they felt painting had lost since the time of Raphael. Their works were often inspired by literary and historical themes, approached with a high degree of seriousness and representing moments of intense emotion.
Among the paintings featured in this exhibition I would like to underline The last sleep of Arthur in Avalon by Edward Coley Burne-Jones, a painting of big dimensions, inspired by the last scene of Thomas Malory's Morte d’Arthur.
The encounter with the Arthurian cycle, in Thomas Malory’s version of Morte d’Arthur, proved a real revelation for the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and it impressed its literary and romantic seal on many of their works.

IN CASE YOU DIDN´T SEE IT YET…

Yes, we have surrendered to trash TV. But, well, at least this is British trash TV, so we can always say: ‘Hey, I´m practicing my English!’ I don´t even know if it´s for real (with these shows you never can tell), but wouldn´t it be nice if it were? After all we all need to dream…

I´m sorry, I´ve tried to upload here the clip, but it doesn´t work, so here is the link to see it in Youtube.

VISUAL LEARNERS, LINGUISTIC LEARNERS

A recent study carried out by the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience, at the University of Pennsylvania, reveals that those who consider themselves as visual learners convert linguistically presented information into a visual representation of such information.
On the contrary, verbal learners tend to convert visual information into linguistic representations.

By means of magnetic resonance imaging technology, professor Sharon Thomson-Schill and her team scanned the brains of 18 subjects while performing several tests that involved both word-based and picture-based feature matching conditions. The results demonstrated that modality-specific areas of the brain were activated depending on how the subjects consider themselves: visual or linguistic learners.

So, once again, science confirms what everybody knows intuitively. Now investigators expect that further research will be useful for educators in helping them to determine the most effective way to learn for each individual.

I think it would be also interesting to determine if one learning system is more effective than the other and –as a mere curiosity- if there are more visual learners than linguistic learners or vice versa.

THAT´S A THESAURUS!

It is really difficult to determine how important internet has been for linguists in our age: very important, awfully important, overwhelmingly important… Probably it will never be exactly pondered the astounding amount of language resources available on line. Never before the students, the scholars, the writers both the amateurs and professionals, have had so many dictionaries, so many thesaurus, so many corpus and data at their disposal.

We could probably be surfing on the net 24 hours a day for a whole year and we wouldn´t stop finding new interesting word related places. My most recent discovery has been a device called Visual Thesaurus. The site defines itself as “an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words”, and the New York Times describes it as “imaginative, ingenious and fanciful”, adjectives that I subscribe enthusiastically.

Some ago I said that the English speaking world pays much more attention to their language that we, the Spanish speaking people, do. Everyday I´m more persuaded of it. We are at a distance that can be measured only in astronomical units. I would love to have in Spanish language something similar to Visual Thesaurus.

The only flaw I can see in it is that you have to pay for use it, but nothing´s perfect! Take a look at it, at least to peek is for free!

PRACTISING PHONETICS

Phonetic Flash is a section in the UCL Phonetics & Linguistics website which includes some activities useful to practise and revise English phonetics.

There are four kinds of exercises:

Labels. Choosing the correct voice, place, and manner labels for a given symbol.
Symbols. Choosing the appropriate symbol for a given label.
Words. Choosing the appropriate symbol for the vowel in a word.
Hit and miss. Choosing the words which contain the sound symbolised.

BE POLITE, STUPID!

Once again The Engine Room calls our attention to a linguistic oddity. This time JD, the author of this blog, exposes his perplexity in dealing with what is and what is not polite according with the BBC guide of style. We may agree or not with the British broadcasting channel, but what is sure is that the joke is funny:

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go camping and pitch their tent under the stars. In the middle of the night, Holmes wakes his companion up and says: "Watson, look up at the stars and tell me what you deduce." Watson says: "I see millions of stars and maybe quite a few planets among them. It may be true that a few of the planets are quite like Earth and there might be life on them." Holmes replies: "Watson, you bloody fool*! Somebody has stolen our tent!"

Well, the guys at the BBC consider that:

*Bloody is a medium-strong swear word, used to give emotional emphasis to something that you are saying. It should not be used in polite situations. For polite conversation, substitute: You stupid idiot!

No doubt politeness is a great thing!

CATCHER AND PHRASEMAKER

Yogi Berra (born May 12, 1925, in St. Louis, Missouri) is a former Major League Baseball player and manager. He played almost his entire career for the New York Yankees (in the picture with his teammates he is the second from the left).
Berra is widely regarded as one of the greatest catchers in baseball history. Berra, who quit school very young, is also well known for his pithy comments and witticisms, known as Yogiisms.
Through the years, Berra’s language skills made him famous. Simultaneously denying and confirming his reputation, Berra once stated, "I didn't really say everything I said.".

Here you have some of his most famous examples:

• "Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical."


• "You can observe a lot by watching".


• "If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be".


• "If you can’t imitate him, don´t copy him".


• On why he no longer went to a popular St. Louis restaurant: "Nobody goes there no more; it's too crowded!" .


• When giving directions to his New Jersey home, which was equally accessible via two different routes: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."


• On being the guest of honor at an awards banquet: "I'd like to thank all those who made this night necessary."


• "You can observe a lot by just watching."


• "Always go to other people's funerals; otherwise they won't come to yours."

As a catcher and phrasemaker, Yogi Berra has had no equal.

WHAT WE SAY AND WHAT WE MEAN

Cinema and language. Scene 9

In this scene from Mary Poppins, we find an instance of a speech act where the conventional meaning of the utterances and the speaker’s intention conflict. In this case, the hearers are requested to do just the opposite of what the speaker desires. It is also a nice example of reverse psychology, something that often works with children and teenagers.

1ST APRIL

This morning I received an email from a workmate, which the antivirus tool in my computer immediately labelled as ‘hoax’. That was the first time I found this category in the mail classification provided by anti-spam filters and wondered what hint could the programme have read in order to consider it false information. Probably that came from the explicit request to spread the news and send the message back to as many people as possible.

These kinds of messages include different pieces of advice regarding computer security, health, solidarity and even luck. Although some of them sound really suspicious, many people decide to obey without thinking too much about their reliability or intention.

The medium for distributing hoaxes is not restricted to emailed texts. It also can be found in slide presentations, videos, websites, etc. A recursive topic for this sort of disinformation is the attribution of poems written by unknown writers to recognised poets, as it is explained in this article regarding some texts not precisely created by Pablo Neruda.

Snopes website collects a series of true and false statements, news, quotes… widely spread through different media. Among them, I read that the famous sentence “Elementary, my dear Watson” was never recorded in Conan Doyle’s novels and also find this collection of statements attributed to John Kerry and George Bush.

The British Library website also includes a section on disinformation and lies. The activities are aimed at students but some videos are really funny. A nice treat for this April Fool’s Day

.