Slán Magnus
The black chair, the narrow light, the arms on chair, closeup on the face. I can’t be the only one whose heart raced worrying some individual in the leather chair wouldn’t remember some tiny detail from some literary tome or the name of an obscure river in Panama? Bless, bless (sp?) as they say in his Native Icelandic.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1985125,00.html
Magnus Magnusson, best known for his 25-year reign as Mastermind’s formidable and cerebral inquisitor, has died, aged 77.
The TV presenter, journalist, historian and author will be remembered for his catchphrase – “I’ve started, so I’ll finish” – heard often during his interrogation of subjects in the black leather chair.
Magnusson hosted Mastermind on the BBC from 1972 until 1997, making him synonymous with a quiz show that gained mass appeal and up to 22 million viewers, and paved the way for today’s more aggressive formats.
Mr Blair’s working memory problem
A spokeswoman said Mr Blair will make his views clear this week – and he’s expected to say the way in which Saddam was executed was “completely wrong – but it shouldn’t lead us to forget the crimes Saddam committed”
http://www.channel4.com/news/special-reports/special-reports-storypage.jsp?id=4295
The man was hanged on Dec. 30th. Today it’s Jan 7th and it appears Mr Blair is still mulling over whether or not the circumstances of his execution were acceptable.
It seems likely Mr Blair has confirmed to the public a working memory problem to accompany his numerous other challenges chiefly with bending the facts to suit a situation and questionable music tastes.
How not to write a novel
Spend seven years continuously generating material until it fills up in four large boxes and you cannot find any part of it in a hurry, so inevitably you begin to write that part again. On reflection you see you’ve written three different novels, none of which have an ending. Like constantly knitting the arms of a jumper, without noticing there’s no back nor front to it.
Alice Flaherty has written an interesting book on a neurologist’s perspective on the creative brain, the urge to write and writers block. Usually I would avoid reading books about writing and just stick to writing and or rereading the classics, but was attracted by the brain ingredients in it. Then upon reading it discovered this notion of hypergraphia. She’ll hopefully write a follow-up which explains how the hypergraphic writer fathoms editing without marrying an editor, which given some of the contents of the current publishing catalogues would hardly set the pulse a-racing.
I’ve noticed it’s popular to remark on the writing process in newspaper articles. Writers often are asked about it. Curious then that no one suggests how not to do it. This would likely be far more use. Also, people are largely interested in the writing process once it’s over, which is a terrible pity. It would be more interesting to read an interview with some harried writer half way through, rather than when they are chipper and have forgotten the misery.
Early on New Year’s day I expressed the sentiment to a charming person beside me at a party, who was ruminating on Chick Lit, that it would be a more noble gesture for certain writers (this extends far beyond just the realm of chick lit) to actually read good books, rather than consider writing books at all. I was promptly told to get off my literary high horse.
Giddy up.
Subconsciously, I may already have heeded my own advice.
Mighty leap
For those on the European end of things who may have missed this tale about Wesley Autrey leaping down onto the New York subway tracks to aide a man having a seizure. Myself and the small puffin were sincerely impressed with this tale, also with his children standing on the platform watching.
Predictions of man pushing a bicycle
Trundling up the hill with a couple of loaves at the ready last week, as I was conveniently mustering up curmugeonly thoughts about the nuisance of Christmas, I caught sight of a man I didn’t use to live far from and he greets me with a hearty Merry Christmas. I fall into step with him and his bicycle, which he’s pushing with some gusto. I ask after damage to the trees near him following the recent storm and following a detailed report on the tumble of several large branches he swiftly deviates into mumblings along the lines of man being a whirlwind and being headed for calamity. I offer a few global warming hints, but he’s not talking about global warming he’s on some other plain. “Some people,” he says, ” have had certain experiences and these experiences have prevented them from doing things.” He’s getting pretty cryptic at this point, and much as I am tempted to inquire after the variety of these experiences (would it be borstal or moving statues or messages from the beyond, or eating toast?). Mostly I want to inquire to see if perhaps I might have had one, but I resist because if I stop him in his flow we might get into some moral disagreement and then he won’t answer what I really want to know. So on he continues and it’s riveting, but just as the conspiracy of world tumult is getting going he keeps interrupting it to tell me he believes in reincarnation. Again tempted as I am to refer him to neuro Henry and the surgeons view we will not be returning as frogs I keep my replies limited to appropriate “rights, and is that right, yes indeed.”
He’s very keen to express that even though he knows it’s all coming to a head and the world’s essentially on a collision course to an abrupt end that he’s relaxed about it because he’s known about it for a while and besides he believes in reincarnation and so this is what has to happen.
Finally I can no longer contain myself so I ask quietly: would you have clue about a date when you think this might all be due to happen?
And very clearly and confidently he answers “yes around 2012.” I must say that I admire a conspiracy theory where the practical things like dates and times have been nailed.
It’s time to turn left because he’s back to the cryptic crossword talk again. We bid our goodbyes and as he loops into the traffic he raises his arm in the air and encourages me repeatedly to have “fortitude.”
It rather made my day to know there are folks milling around who pay so much attention to detail. There was something almost architectural about the precision and exactness with which he envisaged the future. Obviously he was a little more woolly on the past.
Fortitude indeed.
Where is the Iraqi War Literature?
Damascus, Asharq Al Awsat – With a few exceptions of Iraqi writers and artists, the continuous bloodshed in Iraq has failed to elicit any poetry or prose from the Arab men of letters. While political writers expounded and analyzed, the literary writers and artists did not channel this harrowing Arab tragedy into creativity, and neither did they attempt to engage with it.
http://aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=3&id=7322
(interesting article worth reading.)
I’ve been wondering about this for a long while, from a slightly different perspective, why are there so few fiction writers translated into English? The foremost Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifeh has one of her seven novels available in English according to Words Without Borders. Surely publishers have a significant role to play in it.
Last year I tried to write a piece about Iraqi writers still living in Iraq, it was difficult to get any newspaper to bite on it and even harder to find writers because of communication problems. (ie. no electricity etc) and because I am a complete neophyte on the topic. Then I intended to turn it into a radio essay, but John McGahern died and his passing bumped the beleagured Iraqi writer and the essay turned to him.
I did talk to a number of exiled writers and academics who all had various takes on it, including in one opinion that there was an avoidance of Arabic literature by publishers (Western). I should dig out what I gathered and upload it to a page. At the time I felt rather out of my depth and couldn’t understand why the New York Times had not commissioned some arts journalist to go on the trail of the Iraqi writer. I remember being convinced that if everyone who marched in a protest actually went out and purchased a translated, small press, novel, as a political gesture, it could kick start some kind of financial injection into Iraqi lit or just translated literature generally that would result in more writers having opportunities to publish. But it would have to be novels that people bought, not tomes with angry titles.
One press who had published a significant novel reviewed favourably in the NY Times admitted they had yet to raise the cash to even pay the translation bill and could barely afford to send out review copies. I realized at that point the scale of what they were up against.
Here’s a link to the Baghdad supplement that Al-Ahram did back in 2003.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/634/bo1.htm
The list of blue titles on the right hand side link to different essays and pieces.
Mr Pamuk’s take on his dad’s suitcase — audio
Here’s a radio link to an English translation of Orhan Pamuk’s Turkish essay/speech given in response to his recent Nobel Prize cheque.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/pip/56ujd/?focuswin
Is it my imagination or are there a remarkable number of unpublished dads behind published male writers? I’ve never noticed this trend with women. Or mothers handing over their notebooks. Of course, it could be that dads forget to mention their literary ambitions to their daughters. It’s also highly likely that having a writer for a parent would sincerely put you off ever lifting your pen. It’s not exactly like having a footballer or snooker player for a parent, where you can go a few rounds out by the front hedge or bond over the green felt.
Flaubert’s take
“However much you fatten human cattle, giving them straw as high as their bellies, and even gilding their stable, they will remain brutes, no matter what one says. All the advance that one can hope for, is to make the brute a little less wicked. But as for elevating the ideas of the mass, giving it a larger and therefore a less human conception of God, I have my doubts”
There now something to brighten up your Sunday morning. Some of Flaubert’s and George Sand’s correspondence can be found ici:
Randomness
A random remark and conversation about a dog (given I’m not generally a fan of dogs, it really was random) a few days ago led a young woman to describe to me how earlier in the week she had been “jumped” by three guys in a residential street. They pushed her to the ground and repeatedly kicked her in the ribs, when she refused to go with them to the bank machine. Remarkably, the woman, who I’d observed previously to be a patient, gentle individual, now with several broken ribs, had only one big question in relation to it: What was going through their minds while they did it?
Today when listening to that brain programme I thought of that incident again. Those six legs that chose to kick her operated from three different brains. And since they repeatedly kicked her, were those also single individual brains making the choice to do that each time or at that point had they somehow melded into one?
She was able to somehow see a bigger tapestry. Surprisingly she did not express bitterness toward the area where it happened. She was grateful to still have her teeth. It was the question of their minds that had remained with her, even overriding the residual pain of their boots which must have persisted with every inhale of the conversation. I should say that there was nothing religious about this woman, she was not in some kind of forgiveness mode: she genuinely sought an answer to that question.
We know so little about the brain.
Neuro Henry on brain, science and medicine.
Here’s the listen again link to the Free thinking program with Henry Marsh — neurosurgeon.
He puts the cap on notion of the soul and afterlife, so basically you can relax on that front. By the sounds of it unlikely we’ll be returning as frogs or anything wiggly. He also somewhat dismisses the implied significance of left/right brain divisions, saying it’s not as absolute as previously purported by some factions. There’s a whole wadge of other stuff, but due to poor memory I cannot recall. It’s probably the most engaging thing I have heard on this yellow brick road of lunching with logic. Maybe because it’s audio. Maybe because he’s a bit of a skeptic, which appeals to my first language: pessimism.