The Poetry Station

The Poetry Station website shows a collection of video recorded poems. Browsing through it for a while in the late hours of this Sunday evening, I've listened to some poems of varied styles and topics that, for some reason or other, have drawn my attention. These are three of them:

Listen Mr Oxford Don. I had read the poem before in Evolving English by David Crystal. This linguist chose this text to comment on the "ownership" of English.

"The reality is that anyone who has taken the trouble to learn English can be said to have a stake in it -- and that means around a third of the world's population."

The Rain It Raineth. I knew the song from an old record I bought years ago but I had never thought of its meaning. The Wikipedia interprets that the line "The rain it raineth every day" suggests that "every day brings some kind of misery". Other people read Feste's song as a statement that "even as a person goes through life, with its various ups and downs, he or she must remember that at any time one can end up in an unfamiliar place with a completely different life". Harold Bloom gives a slightly different explanation when he comments on it from a popular and erotic point of view.

A Lecture Upon the Shadow was entirely new to me. I liked the poem and the reading.

Lit2Go: stories and poems to be read or listened to

Lit2Go is a collection of texts that can be read online or from a downloaded pdf document as well as listened to on the computer or from another type of mp3 player (all the audio files can be downloaded).

BOOKDRUM

Bookdrum provides background information about a good number of books. It is possible to find images and descriptions of the setting, summaries of the stories, reviews, biographical data of the authors, quotes, etc.

LITERARY WORKS TO BE READ AND/OR LISTENED TO

LoudLit collects some public domain literary works that can be read page by page online while listening to its recording.

This is an example:



A Dream within a Dream

JANE AUSTEN'S 235TH BIRTHDAY

Google reminds us today of Jane Austen's 235th birthday. A curious number to celebrate but nevertheless a good pretext to post this short entry.

"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us."

Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 5

A NEWLY FOUND POEM BY TED HUGHES

Last Sunday I heard about "Last Letter" for the first time. Browsing through the Internet for a while, I realise that the discovery of this unpublished poem by Ted Hughes has been a media event in the literary circles of the English speaking world, especially in the UK. The dramatic relationship of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath together with the charm of their two somehow dark and powerful personalities, some aspects of their lives and the quality of their works have the power to make a poem worth reading by many people who otherwise are not too fond of poetry.

HOWARD JACOBSON WINS THE BOOKER PRIZE

Howard Jacobson is the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Finkler Question.
The Finkler Question is a novel about love, loss and male friendship, and explores what it means to be Jewish today.
Said to have ‘some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language', The Finkler Question has been described as ‘wonderful' and ‘richly satisfying' and as a novel of ‘full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding'.
Sir Andrew Motion, Chair of the judges, made the announcement yesterday, 12th of October, from the awards dinner at London's Guildhall.

Andrew Motion comments "The Finkler Question is a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize.'
Howard Jacobson has been longlisted twice for the prize, in 2006 for Kalooki Nights and in 2002 for Who's Sorry Now, but has never before been shortlisted.

FRANK KERMODE DIED LAST AUGUST

Acclaimed British literary critic Sir Frank Kermode, the author of Shakespeare’s Language, died last august at the age of 90 in Cambridge.
Prominent in literary criticism since the 1950s, Kermode held "virtually every endowed chair worth having in the British Isles", according to his former colleague John Sutherland, from King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge to Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London and professor of poetry at Harvard, along with honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He was knighted in 1991.
A renowned Shakespearean, publishing Shakespeare's Language in 2001, Kermode's books range from works on Spenser and Donne and the memoir Not Entitled to last year's Concerning EM Forster.
Another two of his books that will be probably well remembered are The Sense of An Ending, his collection of lectures on the relationship of fiction to concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis, first published in 1967, and Romantic Image, a study of the Romantic movement up until WB Yeats.
The range of Kermode's gaze is shown by his book Pleasing Myself, which pulls together his literary journalism, reviewing everything from Seamus Heaney's new translation of Beowulf to Philip Roth's "splendidly wicked" Sabbath's Theater.
He fundamentally changed the study of English literature in the 1960s by introducing French theory by post-structuralists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, and post-Freudians such as Jacques Lacan, into what Sutherland described as "the torpid bloodstream of British academic discourse".

CAREY HEADS UP BOOKER SHORTLIST

Australian author Peter Carey, who has won the Man Booker prize twice, has been shortlisted again for this year's award. If victorious, Carey will be the first author to win three Man Bookers.

He is joined in this shortlist by Andrea Levy, Emma Donoghue, Damon Galgut, Howard Jacobson and Tom McCarthy.

Carey is nominated for Parrot and Olivier in America.
He previously picked up the prestigious literary prize in 1998 for Oscar and Lucinda and again in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang.
Parrot and Olivier in America is set during the 19th century - Olivier is a French aristocrat sent to the New World, ostensibly to study its prisons, but in reality to save his neck in a future revolution.Parrot is the son of an itinerant English printer, who must spy on and protect him.
The other titles to make the shortlist are Levy's The Long Song, Donoghue's Room, Galgut's In a Strange Room, Jacobson's The Finkler Question and McCarthy's C.

LITERARY LANDSCAPES

In London it is not difficult to come across some reference to writers studied in the literature subjects of English Philology through nameplates indicating the relationship of a particular writer with a building, exhibits in museums and libraries, statues, etc. In my last visit to this city the “familiar encounter” took the shape of a sculptured John Betjeman looking up at St Pancras Station roof. The reason for this honour is the fact that Betjeman fought against the plans for the demolition of St Pancras Station in the 1960's.

JABBERWOCKY

This blog does not update too often these days -too much work? other interests? lack of ideas to share? - it does not matter but ... not a single post in April? I still have some minutes left before May starts and, not finding anything more informative or serious, I will allow a bit of nonsense to fill this entry.

Last week I saw Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and enjoyed it. The story was not Carroll's and this time the script contained allusions to a 'real world' which somehow explains and is influenced by the actions underground as well as a conventional plot of struggle between good and evil with a heroine. Anyway it still keeps part of the nonsensical and dreamlike atmosphere of the original.

Alice's stories contain plenty of nonsensical images or dialogues to choose from, among them the poem Jabberwocky.

Here I leave a link to some translations of the poem.

ELMORE LEONARD'S RULES FOR WRITERS

During this month of March, Elmore Leonard, the well known crime writer, is publishing a new book, "10 Rules of Writing". The following is a brief summary of his advice that I have taken from The Guardian.

1. Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."

3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

5. Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "Ameri­can and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're ­Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

THE GLOBE STAGES FIRST PLAY WRITTEN BY A WOMAN

The Globe theatre is to stage the first play in its history by a female playwright. It will be the premiere of a new work by Nell Leyshon.

The original Globe where many of Shakespeare's works were first performed - by all-male companies - has no records of plays by women and, until now, none has been programmed in the modern reconstruction in the 13 years since it opened.

Leyshon is working on Bedlam, a "funny and bawdy" story of a beautiful woman inmate in the London hospital for the insane in the 18th century.

When interviewed by the media, she said she was excited but it did seem "shocking" to be making such a gender breakthrough as late as 2010. "It made me really think about all the women who are in graveyards with their talent for writing unfulfilled. But it's luck for me. I was the first person to come along with an idea that was right for the Globe."

Leyshon, 48 years old and a mother of two, originally made television commercials before turning to writing. She won the Evening Standard award for Comfort Me With Apples only five years ago.

Her work is part of a season that includes a new Howard Brenton play on Anne Boleyn, Dominic Rowan playing Henry VIII and Lucy Bailey directing Macbeth in collaboration with Venezuelan choreographer Javier de Frutos. Bedlam will run from 5 September to 1 October as part of the Globe season from 23 April to 3 October. It is a “must” if you visit London during those months.

JONATHAN LITTELL WINS THE BAD SEX IN FICTION PRIZE

Author Jonathan Littell has won the 17th annual Bad Sex In Fiction Award, for his novel The Kindly Ones.
The book, which was originally published in French, won the Prix Goncourt in 2006 and has sold over a million copies in Europe.
Judges at The Literary Review gave him the bad sex prize for a passage that begins: "This sex was watching at me, spying on me, like a Gorgon's head".
In one excerpt, the author describes a sexual encounter as "a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg".
The Literary Review said Littell's book was "in part a work of genius", adding they hoped the author would take their dishonour "in good humour".
The shortlist for the prize also included works by Paul Theroux and musician Nick Cave

RAP, HIP-HOP AND CLASSICS

The other day I read this post by David Crystal in which he commented a project led by hip-hop artist Akala to work on Shakespeare with young people.

After watching the video below, I also think that the activity can be really positive to approach classic literature to the youth apart from the opportunity to practise reading, pronunciation, rhythm... in a fun way.




By chance, I have also come across a video recording where two Secondary students recite "Lo que puede el dinero" written by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita. The video can be watched from the bottom of Leer.es website.

AND THE BOOKER GOES TO…HILARY MANTEL

Author Hilary Mantel has been named 2009 Man Booker Prize winner for her historical novel Wolf Hall, based on Henry VIII's adviser Thomas Cromwell.
Chairman of judges James Naughtie said: "Our decision was based on the sheer bigness of the book. The boldness of its narrative, its scene setting".
"The extraordinary way that Hilary Mantel has created what one of the judges has said was a contemporary novel, a modern novel, which happens to be set in the 16th Century.We thought it was an extraordinary piece of story-telling.”,added Naughtie.
Mantel saw her first novel, Every Day is Mother's Day, published in 1985.
Its sequel, Vacant Possession, followed a year later.
In 1989 she won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for Fludd. Then A Place of Greater Safety scooped the Sunday Express Book Of The Year award in 1993.
Three years later Mantel was presented with the Hawthornden Prize for An Experiment in Love.She was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction, both in 2006, for the novel Beyond Black.

SEVEN DIDN'T ARRIVE TO THE SHORTLIST

The Booker Prize organizers published last week the shortlist for this year’s awards. You can find it in a previous post in this blog. In the way to this shortlist seven other books have fallen from the initial longlist where 13 books were initially chosen. Here you have the seven that never arrived to the shortlist:

Me Cheeta by James Lever
The ‘autobiography’ of the chimpanzee who co-starred with Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan films.

Heliopolis by James Scudamore
The book is told from the perspective of a 27-year-old who was born in a Sao Paolo shantytown but now lives on the other side of the city’s social divide.

The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey
It is the story of a man in his early 60s who is struggling with the onset of Alzheimers and trying to keep his memories and identity as the debilitating disease takes hold.

Love and Summer by William Trevor
This story is set in a small Irish town over the course of one long summer, when a stranger arrives on his bicycle and falls for a young married girl.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
A young Irish woman leaves 1950s Ireland for a life in Brooklyn.

Not Untrue & Not Unkind by Ed O’Loughlin
The book follows the story of journalist Owen Simmons who finds a dossier on the desk of his dead newspaper editor which leads him to Africa and a woman he once loved.

How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall
This book weaves together four stories spanning half a century, from an elderly Italian painter to the young blind girl he teaches.

RECOMMENDING BOOKS

Today I participated in a first session of a book club in English. It's been a kind of introductory meeting where the participants have commented on one or more books that we've read and enjoyed sufficiently as to recommend them to others.

These are some of the titles mentioned in the evening:

Possession by A.S. Byatt.
Experience by Martin Amis.
Bleak House by Dickens.
The Queen of Whale Cay by Kate Summerscale.
Dreams and Shadows by Robin Wright.
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.
A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry.
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry.
Deaf Sentence by David Lodge.
The Help by Kathryn Stockett.
Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love by Allan Pease & Barbara Pease.
Some books by Laurie Graham.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami.
Wild Nights by Joyce Carol Oates.

BOOKER PRIZE 2009 SHORTLIST ANNOUNCED

A S Byatt, J M Coetzee, Adam Foulds, Hilary Mantel, Simon Mawer and Sarah Waters have been announced as the shortlisted authors for the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
The six books are: A S Byatt The Cildren's Book; J M Coetzee Summertime ; Adam Foulds The Quickening Maze ; Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall ; Simon Mawer The Glass Room and Sarah Waters The Little Stranger.
Having previously won in 1999 with Disgrace and 1983 with Life & Times of Michael K, South African writer J.M. Coetzee would be the first author to win the Man Booker Prize three times if successful this year. A.S. Byatt is in the running for a second win - her novel Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990. Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black was longlisted in 2005. Sarah Waters has been shortlisted twice for Fingersmith (2002) and The Night Watch (2006). The youngest on the list, at 34, is Adam Foulds and Simon Mawer is shortlisted for his eighth novel, The Glass Room.
The winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be revealed on Tuesday 6 October 2009 at a dinner at London's Guildhall and will be broadcast on BBC News across television, radio and online. The winning author will receive £50,000 and can look forward to greatly increased sales and worldwide recognition.

QUIZZES

Quizicon web site offers a collection of more than one hundred quizzes about a variety of topics.

Some of them are related to language and literature:
- 10 most common English words.
- 10 most common Spanish words.
- Authors of classic novels.
- Punctuation symbols.
- Cockney alphabet.
- Shakespeare's plays.

Why not try one of them as a means of revision, a mental challenge or just for fun?

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