It is extremely tempting to try and summarize the wildly intense, brain-and-sensory overload that was the JLF 2012 in a series of one-liners, not least because there were quite a few memorable ones..
They ran from the imperative-
'dance naked! do it now!' (Hoshang Merchant, Indian writer of Gay fiction)
to the critical-
'[Obama's] Nobel Prize was a prize for not being George Bush' (David Remnick, Editor of The New Yorker)
to the philosophical-
'Sikhism is not something of the hereafter, it is about living the right way in this world. A kind of detachment in attachment.' (Navtej Sarna, writer and diplomat)
to the historical-
'Hitler and Stalin did not inherit absolute power the way that Peter the Great did, they rose to it - it's not lunacy or moral imbecility, it's great people skills.' (historian Simon Sebag Montefiore)
to the metaphorical-
'turn your body into ink and your mind into paper, then turn your bones into a pen' (The Vision of the Gurus session)
to the scatological-
'Purgatives are like purgatory, they almost make you believe' (Indian writer R. Raj Rao)
to meditations on journalism and power-
'the job of journalism is to put pressure on power' (David Remnick, Editor of The New Yorker)
on journalism and literature-
'there is only so far journalism can go, and then literature takes over' (Jason Burke, journalist and writer)
or just on journalism-
'Somebody won't often be able to give you a soundbite about their lives immediately. But if you shut up and follow them and spend the time, that truth will emerge.' (Katherine Boo, journalist and writer)
and then on how the internet is affecting the aesthetics of literature-
'the internet is our greatest living novel...it's the playground of millions' (Argentinian writer Pola Oloixarac)
on modern identity politics-
'you're not purely anything anymore' (novelist Teju Cole)
and on how to write that play or novel you have inside you-
'Get rid of the delusion that you'll somehow do it by not doing it. Taking a walk or sitting by the pool isn't going to magic a play into existence.' (Tom Stoppard, playwright)
and finally, perhaps a snippet or two of Bakhti poetry
'God, My Darling,
Do me a favour
And kill my mother-in-law'
and
'Void is not devoid of God'
But of course, as the long list of quotes shows, not only have I failed to catch the festival in one line, I have failed to catch it in a few. And that really was what pushed this festival over the edge of being an experience you can process, post-portem, regurgitate and file away neatly, to being an experience that leaves an indelible mark and changes the scale of the way of you think.
It seems inevitable that the JLF will continue to grow, and I often heard it bandied about during the festival that next year, the organizers would have to shift to a larger venue, so I feel privileged to have been able to attend the festival while it was still (just about) Diggi-Palace-size. But I'm certain that however it grows, and whatever corporate sponsors and celebrity guests it succeeds in attracting, the next Jaipur Literature Festivals will still be about a 'curiosity about the internal life of words, and about the creative imaginations that give birth to them.' (Namita Gokhale, novelist and festival organizer)
What's more, and even better, the JLF, with its huge and uniformly enthusiastic number of attendees, its international participants and its cosmopolitan atmosphere, did and does 'testify in an uncomplicated way to the power of literature and what it can do.' (Teju Cole, novelist)
Above and below the hobnobbing and professional networking, and certainly beyond the persistent political controversy, the festival seems ultimately to be about interested, engaged and switched-on people coming together, ready to encounter the other through the written and the spoken word.
(For videos of the sessions, pictures and more info, go to http://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/)
Wednesday, 1 February 2012
Thursday, 19 January 2012
Anticipating Otherness
By a stroke of good fortune (otherwise known as my 80 year-old grandmother flying business class and getting us in), I am currently tapping away surrounded by the atmosphere of hushed luxury that attends to the King David Lounge in Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv.
I am about to board a flight for Mumbai, India, and from there to catch a domestic flight going north to Jaipur in Rajasthan. Once there, I will begin an intensive 4 or 5 days of literary activities taking place from dawn till dusk at the ‘democratic’ and colossal Jaipur Literature Festival. Along with up to 11,000 other people per day (the festival estimates it will have about 60,000 attendees in total), I will be privileged enough to hear international writers like Lionel Shriver, Ariel Dorfman, Michael Ondaatje and Tom Stoppard, have the opportunity to ogle Oprah, as well as meeting some of the best of local Indian talent, among them the distinguished and charismatic writer Navtej Sarna, who isn’t strictly local as he’s also currently the Indian Ambassador to Israel.
Right now though, all that remains in glorious, anticipatory obscurity. I’m expecting it all to be great, but I have no experience to compare it to, and truthfully, I could be listening to these writers anywhere. Instead, what’s really occupying my mind at this wonderfully relaxed moment of lounge transit where no one can touch me because I’m already, officially, traveling – is India.
It’s one of those places that everybody who goes to immediately falls in love with. Everyone seems to discover their inner, laid-back selves and instantly becomes convinced they could happily live on dahl and inner peace for the rest of their lives. “The colours!” they almost moan, “you’ve never seen anything like it”.
I have a secret confession. I’ve been to India before, and I didn’t love it. I liked it, sure, but most of the time I was too busy worrying about what all the rice and poppadums were going to do to my figure to have time to be taking it all in. I suspect I did India entirely the wrong way, with my father, sister and grand parents, with the whole trip planned from start to finish, from luxury hotel to hotel. I shouldn’t complain of course, but between my younger frame of mind and all the shining marble lobbies I doubt I quite connected correctly.
Still, I sometimes worry that I lack that gene, the travel one, that everyone my age seems to have as dominant instead of recessive allele. I just don’t feel that itch, that restlessness that sits in the skin and flares up sometimes to result in tickets booked and stunning Facebook pictures uploaded.
Yet, here I am, waiting to board a flight to one of the most exotic, exciting and enticingly multifaceted countries in the world. So I am anticipating otherness, and quite thrilled to be doing so. I fell into this visit, with no vaunted expectations of doing a ‘big trip’ beyond attending what looks like one of the coolest literary events of the calendar. But I have a feeling I might be going to fall in love with India after all, and perhaps you can expect upcoming blog posts about dahl and spiritual enlightenment from me too.
I am about to board a flight for Mumbai, India, and from there to catch a domestic flight going north to Jaipur in Rajasthan. Once there, I will begin an intensive 4 or 5 days of literary activities taking place from dawn till dusk at the ‘democratic’ and colossal Jaipur Literature Festival. Along with up to 11,000 other people per day (the festival estimates it will have about 60,000 attendees in total), I will be privileged enough to hear international writers like Lionel Shriver, Ariel Dorfman, Michael Ondaatje and Tom Stoppard, have the opportunity to ogle Oprah, as well as meeting some of the best of local Indian talent, among them the distinguished and charismatic writer Navtej Sarna, who isn’t strictly local as he’s also currently the Indian Ambassador to Israel.
Right now though, all that remains in glorious, anticipatory obscurity. I’m expecting it all to be great, but I have no experience to compare it to, and truthfully, I could be listening to these writers anywhere. Instead, what’s really occupying my mind at this wonderfully relaxed moment of lounge transit where no one can touch me because I’m already, officially, traveling – is India.
It’s one of those places that everybody who goes to immediately falls in love with. Everyone seems to discover their inner, laid-back selves and instantly becomes convinced they could happily live on dahl and inner peace for the rest of their lives. “The colours!” they almost moan, “you’ve never seen anything like it”.
I have a secret confession. I’ve been to India before, and I didn’t love it. I liked it, sure, but most of the time I was too busy worrying about what all the rice and poppadums were going to do to my figure to have time to be taking it all in. I suspect I did India entirely the wrong way, with my father, sister and grand parents, with the whole trip planned from start to finish, from luxury hotel to hotel. I shouldn’t complain of course, but between my younger frame of mind and all the shining marble lobbies I doubt I quite connected correctly.
Still, I sometimes worry that I lack that gene, the travel one, that everyone my age seems to have as dominant instead of recessive allele. I just don’t feel that itch, that restlessness that sits in the skin and flares up sometimes to result in tickets booked and stunning Facebook pictures uploaded.
Yet, here I am, waiting to board a flight to one of the most exotic, exciting and enticingly multifaceted countries in the world. So I am anticipating otherness, and quite thrilled to be doing so. I fell into this visit, with no vaunted expectations of doing a ‘big trip’ beyond attending what looks like one of the coolest literary events of the calendar. But I have a feeling I might be going to fall in love with India after all, and perhaps you can expect upcoming blog posts about dahl and spiritual enlightenment from me too.
Sunday, 15 January 2012
Whipped Into Submission
And now, to make a move a little far beyond my usual purview - I turn to cooking.
Last year I decided cooking would become my thing. In a sort of Julie/Julia kind of way, I took on the challenge of, well, actually cooking anything at all. Despite it being the cause for many another kind of problem, being unmarried, I thought to myself, should not prevent me from learning how to cook for other people. I will say here and now that cooking for myself interests me not in the slightest. The idea of preparing for ages only to scoff my creation down in a few minutes is entirely unappealing and really quite frustrating to think of. This may explain my slightly esoteric personal diet....
Still, as someone has said to me - it turns out - I make a really great event cook.
I am perfectly happy to get utterly flustered, blustering about the kitchen rushing to prepare stuffed onions (a four hour vigil by the side of the hob), frantically stabbing at ground mince meat so that it doesn't stick together while it's browning - I've even learned to take a sort of perverse pleasure in my hardcore cleaning of raw poultry. All for the incomparable pleasure of watching other people eat my food and enjoy it.
Mistake me not - this is not some kind of alimentary selflessness that has suddenly reared its head after years of fighting tooth and nail for my own food at the table of my, considerably less culinary, mother - no, this is the supremely self-satisfying action of a prideful amateur cook who secretly believes she is the next Nigella Lawson. The only thing standing between me and her 40+ gourmet loveliness is half a lifetime, some bigger boobs and a good blow dry.
Still - back on topic.
After a successfully moist turkey or two (just bake in a roasting bag and drown in marinade for at least 20 hours before), a rich chilli, crusty breaded chicken, the aforementioned onions and my own invented dessert (read: add peanut butter in large quantities to any other recipe for baked goods), I was feeling pretty damn pleased with myself. I would putter about in the kitchen to the Chocolat score by Rachel Portman (what could be more appropriate) and gradually feel more and more invincible. Obviously a fall was nigh.
Chocolate mousse has long been one of my favorite foods. I am a sweet-tooth kind of girl, and clearly I cottoned on to the natural antioxidants in 70% chocolate pretty early on in life. In my hubris, I decided not only would I make chocolate mousse, but I would do it without an electric whisk.
For anyone who's tried, and anyone who hasn't, making chocolate mousse is like alchemy. The eggs must be separated perfectly. Then the chocolate must be melted and the egg yolks added but not too soon that the heat of the chocolate cooks them, nor too late that the chocolate has begun to harden. All this I just about managed to pull off, with only a couple of snags. No sweat. It was only as the chocolate was out of the precarious bain-marie I had constructed that I turned to the egg whites, and then realized my mistake. The chocolate needed to be folded in toot-sweet, and the egg whites were still disconcertingly liquid.
With gusto, and the added incentive of panic at the hardening chocolate, I began to whisk. And whisk. And continue to whisk. And still the egg whites were not nearly approaching meringue stiffness. I, in sympathy with them, was wilting with exhaustion. My arm hurt, and I was advised by a very kind roomate calling out instructions from her computer screen that I must UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES stop for even ONE MOMENT.
By the time the whites started responding to my tough love, I was closer to being whipped into submission than they were. But I soldiered on and was rewarded by a puffy cloud at least 4 times the size of the original liquid.
I won't bore you with the details of the folding - another important part of the process that you have to get right if you want real fluffiness in your mousse, but suffice it to say that 3 hours of setting later the mousse tasted of perfection.
The point here is not to toot my own horn (although I've enjoyed that). It's appreciating the quite simple fact that cooking rewards endeavour, in a very real, physical and often delicious way.
When I cook, I don't labour trying to decide what to do - that part's already been done for me. All my effort goes into making a formula a reality, and generally speaking, its not only a relief not to have to think for myself, but exceedingly reassuring to be almost certain that if I add flour to butter and then slosh in some milk, with a lot of hand whisking and a dash of faith - bechamel sauce will, indeed, appear.
Last year I decided cooking would become my thing. In a sort of Julie/Julia kind of way, I took on the challenge of, well, actually cooking anything at all. Despite it being the cause for many another kind of problem, being unmarried, I thought to myself, should not prevent me from learning how to cook for other people. I will say here and now that cooking for myself interests me not in the slightest. The idea of preparing for ages only to scoff my creation down in a few minutes is entirely unappealing and really quite frustrating to think of. This may explain my slightly esoteric personal diet....
Still, as someone has said to me - it turns out - I make a really great event cook.
I am perfectly happy to get utterly flustered, blustering about the kitchen rushing to prepare stuffed onions (a four hour vigil by the side of the hob), frantically stabbing at ground mince meat so that it doesn't stick together while it's browning - I've even learned to take a sort of perverse pleasure in my hardcore cleaning of raw poultry. All for the incomparable pleasure of watching other people eat my food and enjoy it.
Mistake me not - this is not some kind of alimentary selflessness that has suddenly reared its head after years of fighting tooth and nail for my own food at the table of my, considerably less culinary, mother - no, this is the supremely self-satisfying action of a prideful amateur cook who secretly believes she is the next Nigella Lawson. The only thing standing between me and her 40+ gourmet loveliness is half a lifetime, some bigger boobs and a good blow dry.
Still - back on topic.
After a successfully moist turkey or two (just bake in a roasting bag and drown in marinade for at least 20 hours before), a rich chilli, crusty breaded chicken, the aforementioned onions and my own invented dessert (read: add peanut butter in large quantities to any other recipe for baked goods), I was feeling pretty damn pleased with myself. I would putter about in the kitchen to the Chocolat score by Rachel Portman (what could be more appropriate) and gradually feel more and more invincible. Obviously a fall was nigh.
Chocolate mousse has long been one of my favorite foods. I am a sweet-tooth kind of girl, and clearly I cottoned on to the natural antioxidants in 70% chocolate pretty early on in life. In my hubris, I decided not only would I make chocolate mousse, but I would do it without an electric whisk.
For anyone who's tried, and anyone who hasn't, making chocolate mousse is like alchemy. The eggs must be separated perfectly. Then the chocolate must be melted and the egg yolks added but not too soon that the heat of the chocolate cooks them, nor too late that the chocolate has begun to harden. All this I just about managed to pull off, with only a couple of snags. No sweat. It was only as the chocolate was out of the precarious bain-marie I had constructed that I turned to the egg whites, and then realized my mistake. The chocolate needed to be folded in toot-sweet, and the egg whites were still disconcertingly liquid.
With gusto, and the added incentive of panic at the hardening chocolate, I began to whisk. And whisk. And continue to whisk. And still the egg whites were not nearly approaching meringue stiffness. I, in sympathy with them, was wilting with exhaustion. My arm hurt, and I was advised by a very kind roomate calling out instructions from her computer screen that I must UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES stop for even ONE MOMENT.
By the time the whites started responding to my tough love, I was closer to being whipped into submission than they were. But I soldiered on and was rewarded by a puffy cloud at least 4 times the size of the original liquid.
I won't bore you with the details of the folding - another important part of the process that you have to get right if you want real fluffiness in your mousse, but suffice it to say that 3 hours of setting later the mousse tasted of perfection.
The point here is not to toot my own horn (although I've enjoyed that). It's appreciating the quite simple fact that cooking rewards endeavour, in a very real, physical and often delicious way.
When I cook, I don't labour trying to decide what to do - that part's already been done for me. All my effort goes into making a formula a reality, and generally speaking, its not only a relief not to have to think for myself, but exceedingly reassuring to be almost certain that if I add flour to butter and then slosh in some milk, with a lot of hand whisking and a dash of faith - bechamel sauce will, indeed, appear.
Thursday, 12 January 2012
Who Is King?
This week saw the fifth in a series of meetings at work with a marketing guru/consultant. It's been quite an education. Mostly because I had to learn marketing jargon and all those endless catchphrase buzzwords in Hebrew instead of English. He has been attempting to help us become a more 'effective' book publishing 'team', giving us 'tools' to improve the 'statistical outputs' of our discussions on what to translate or what not to.
But the most interesting thing he said he left till the last few minutes of the last meeting. He rightly pointed out that what causes people to listen to a particular radio station is not necessarily a specific song or artist, rather the radio DJ. It is the promise of the DJ or the station's taste and judgement that prompts people to listen to this or that station.
Similarly, he argues, when people walk into a bookshop they should be able to choose a book based on its publishing house, or the fact that it is the favorite book of one of their favorite authors, or because it belongs to a particular series based on a genre or literary style that they enjoy. He proposed making a brand out of a publishing house, so that people will buy a book based on its derivation from a particular publisher irrespective of its content. The bookbuyer trusts the judgement of the publishing house.
This was met with widespread skepticism. "Nobody pays attention to the publisher" they cried, or "we don't have a particular genre interest, our lists are too varied to be effectively branded into one 'identity'". As I'm sure some of you are already working out, there are clear, if not easy solutions to follow in order to solve these problems.
But why is what he said so clever? Because as our dear guru explained, banking on a book or an author to sell itself (even with all the help of marketing), is essentially a passive action. You didn't write the book, and you're not the author, therefore you are trapped in the role of being a mediator of content instead of a creator of it.
The minute you accept that you have something more to give as a major publishing house, that the combined intellectual property of the minds at your disposal constitutes a creative force in and of itself (instead of just an editorial one), is the moment you take back control of the market.
Simply put - we were being called upon to add value.
Now, value can manifest as various different things, and this brings me to my title. In a world increasingly flooded not just with writers who are getting publishing deals, but with authors who are self-publishing, and where anyone with a computer and the internet can become a content-creator all by themselves, what kind of value will be truly appreciated?
In the flood, the man in the ark is king. The person who can help other people navigate a tumultuous and chaotic sea is the one who holds a power of real value.
A lot of people say that these days, content is king. I would hazard that, going forward, infrastructure will be king. The ability to generate lists of recommendation, to associate books to larger narratives (the 10 books that inspired bestselling writer 'X', for example), to make a publishing house into a brand with a specific identity that people recognize and trust (as with Virago), in short, to draw lines of delineation and definition in the endless sand of digital content - the person or the company with that skill, will be king.
But the most interesting thing he said he left till the last few minutes of the last meeting. He rightly pointed out that what causes people to listen to a particular radio station is not necessarily a specific song or artist, rather the radio DJ. It is the promise of the DJ or the station's taste and judgement that prompts people to listen to this or that station.
Similarly, he argues, when people walk into a bookshop they should be able to choose a book based on its publishing house, or the fact that it is the favorite book of one of their favorite authors, or because it belongs to a particular series based on a genre or literary style that they enjoy. He proposed making a brand out of a publishing house, so that people will buy a book based on its derivation from a particular publisher irrespective of its content. The bookbuyer trusts the judgement of the publishing house.
This was met with widespread skepticism. "Nobody pays attention to the publisher" they cried, or "we don't have a particular genre interest, our lists are too varied to be effectively branded into one 'identity'". As I'm sure some of you are already working out, there are clear, if not easy solutions to follow in order to solve these problems.
But why is what he said so clever? Because as our dear guru explained, banking on a book or an author to sell itself (even with all the help of marketing), is essentially a passive action. You didn't write the book, and you're not the author, therefore you are trapped in the role of being a mediator of content instead of a creator of it.
The minute you accept that you have something more to give as a major publishing house, that the combined intellectual property of the minds at your disposal constitutes a creative force in and of itself (instead of just an editorial one), is the moment you take back control of the market.
Simply put - we were being called upon to add value.
Now, value can manifest as various different things, and this brings me to my title. In a world increasingly flooded not just with writers who are getting publishing deals, but with authors who are self-publishing, and where anyone with a computer and the internet can become a content-creator all by themselves, what kind of value will be truly appreciated?
In the flood, the man in the ark is king. The person who can help other people navigate a tumultuous and chaotic sea is the one who holds a power of real value.
A lot of people say that these days, content is king. I would hazard that, going forward, infrastructure will be king. The ability to generate lists of recommendation, to associate books to larger narratives (the 10 books that inspired bestselling writer 'X', for example), to make a publishing house into a brand with a specific identity that people recognize and trust (as with Virago), in short, to draw lines of delineation and definition in the endless sand of digital content - the person or the company with that skill, will be king.
Monday, 2 January 2012
Best Of The Best
I'll admit, I'm one day late (or maybe even a couple of days late) to be presenting anyone with the best of the 'best of 2011' lists, but I'll do it anyway for those of you, like me, still catching up to the fact that we've entered another year.
So, in no particular order and without revealing my collating strategies, here are some of the notable books of 2011, drawn from lists as diverse (but not limited to) Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, Goodreads, BookPage and The Guardian.
The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides
The Tiger's Wife - Tea Obreht
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
State of Wonder - Ann Patchett
The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach
The Sisters Brothers - Patrick Dewitt
The Language of Flowers - Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Divergent - Veronica Roth
Stephen King 11/22/63
Swamplandia! - Karen Russell
Pitting myself against these list picks produces interesting results. I read The Marriage Plot and really didn't like it; though I'll concede Eugenides can write a pretty sentence and often touch upon authentic sentiment, I found the book unwieldy, rambling and frankly, a little pointless. The reason I should find this so damning is that Eugenides could have written the book of my generation, those graduating from college into a tough economic climate where it's much more common to stay 'lost' and 'unsure' and to take multiple gap years than it is to settle down to marriage or buckle down to work (or buckle down to marriage and settle down to work - whichever sounds most true to you...). Perhaps it's unfair to expect Eugenides to give me an answer to the existential questions permeating post-grad life, but to be honest, it would have been nice.
The Night Circus is absolutely on my list. I am relishing the prospect of reading something that sounds like a perfect melding of Romeo and Juliet and Harry Potter, and I find myself recommending the book to friends without having read it myself. Best of all, it's been characterized as a 'literary/fantasy' text, and the combination of those two would be enough to have me hopping to an overpriced bookstore if I didn't already own an e-copy.
The Language of Flowers will always remain a favorite of mine. It's not that the book necessarily stays with you in some dramatic, life-altering kind of way. Rather, I was impressed with this book because it could have been kitschy and sentimental and it never, for a moment, was. Plus, the language of flowers gimmick was absolute genius, and I commend Diffenbaugh for having managed to marry it to such emotionally deep and complex subject matter.
State of Wonder was another book I didn't like and the lists did. I just couldn't connect to the protagonist, and the whole thing felt rather removed from our world in the way fantasy usually works - but in this case to the detriment of the novel instead of it's benefit. I'll admit though, Patchett's exploration of the future of female fertility was fascinating.
I'm tempted to sign off and stop rambling, but I can't without saying a word about Dewitt's The Sisters Brothers. An absolute find of a book. Cowboy noir is not my thing, but Dewitt has crafted a text that (so I hear), plays with generic convention at every turn, and finishes by offering something anyone can enjoy. His narrator, Eli, is funny and strangely adorable, in the way that poisonous snakes can be.
If I were to squeeze another book rec. in there, it would probably be Obreht's The Tiger's Wife, which really is as special as they say it is, but I have the sense that book will do the work of continuing to be a sensation all on it's own...
Happy New Year everyone! and happy reading...
So, in no particular order and without revealing my collating strategies, here are some of the notable books of 2011, drawn from lists as diverse (but not limited to) Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, Goodreads, BookPage and The Guardian.
The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides
The Tiger's Wife - Tea Obreht
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
State of Wonder - Ann Patchett
The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach
The Sisters Brothers - Patrick Dewitt
The Language of Flowers - Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Divergent - Veronica Roth
Stephen King 11/22/63
Swamplandia! - Karen Russell
Pitting myself against these list picks produces interesting results. I read The Marriage Plot and really didn't like it; though I'll concede Eugenides can write a pretty sentence and often touch upon authentic sentiment, I found the book unwieldy, rambling and frankly, a little pointless. The reason I should find this so damning is that Eugenides could have written the book of my generation, those graduating from college into a tough economic climate where it's much more common to stay 'lost' and 'unsure' and to take multiple gap years than it is to settle down to marriage or buckle down to work (or buckle down to marriage and settle down to work - whichever sounds most true to you...). Perhaps it's unfair to expect Eugenides to give me an answer to the existential questions permeating post-grad life, but to be honest, it would have been nice.
The Night Circus is absolutely on my list. I am relishing the prospect of reading something that sounds like a perfect melding of Romeo and Juliet and Harry Potter, and I find myself recommending the book to friends without having read it myself. Best of all, it's been characterized as a 'literary/fantasy' text, and the combination of those two would be enough to have me hopping to an overpriced bookstore if I didn't already own an e-copy.
The Language of Flowers will always remain a favorite of mine. It's not that the book necessarily stays with you in some dramatic, life-altering kind of way. Rather, I was impressed with this book because it could have been kitschy and sentimental and it never, for a moment, was. Plus, the language of flowers gimmick was absolute genius, and I commend Diffenbaugh for having managed to marry it to such emotionally deep and complex subject matter.
State of Wonder was another book I didn't like and the lists did. I just couldn't connect to the protagonist, and the whole thing felt rather removed from our world in the way fantasy usually works - but in this case to the detriment of the novel instead of it's benefit. I'll admit though, Patchett's exploration of the future of female fertility was fascinating.
I'm tempted to sign off and stop rambling, but I can't without saying a word about Dewitt's The Sisters Brothers. An absolute find of a book. Cowboy noir is not my thing, but Dewitt has crafted a text that (so I hear), plays with generic convention at every turn, and finishes by offering something anyone can enjoy. His narrator, Eli, is funny and strangely adorable, in the way that poisonous snakes can be.
If I were to squeeze another book rec. in there, it would probably be Obreht's The Tiger's Wife, which really is as special as they say it is, but I have the sense that book will do the work of continuing to be a sensation all on it's own...
Happy New Year everyone! and happy reading...
Thursday, 29 December 2011
Detectives: The Anti-Hero?
It strikes me somewhere after the 300th time I've read the synopsis for an upcoming detective novel, that almost every one of the blurbs starts off by describing our main protagonist as retiring or withdrawing from the line of duty.
Off they go to some remote, seaside or rural area to get away from it all, to relax, to leave the stress and horror of their jobs far behind. Or, they've often been forcibly and quietly retired from duty after unorthodox or unprofessional conduct.
Off they go to some remote, seaside or rural area to get away from it all, to relax, to leave the stress and horror of their jobs far behind. Or, they've often been forcibly and quietly retired from duty after unorthodox or unprofessional conduct.
Of course, they have but to arrive in said rural/briny region for a body to turn up or a person to go missing, and so begins the standard detective-killer runaround until all is revealed at the end and we pat ourselves on the back for having known who it was all along.
But why is it that we should be so keen to have our heroes be unwilling ones? We seem to be uncomfortable with the idea of a detective straightforwardly doing their job. When normally working, our detective is sanctioned by the institution to which they are attached - usually in some way an official representative of society engaged to solve crimes. Indeed, the detective might be said to fulfill a crucially ordering function, restoring truth to society's narrative and eliminating its threatening elements.
Why, then, do we insist on them not wanting to fulfill this function? Rather to fall into it, unwillingly, if inevitably?
One of our earlier detectives in fiction was Dickens' Mr. Bucket from Bleak House, and critics credit him with playing a reformist role that restores justice to English society in the way lawyers (like the dread Tulkinghorn) cannot. In this sense then, the detective emerges as a anti-hero figure who we trust in a position of power precisely because he does not seek it.
Of course, there must be many, notable exceptions to the phenomenon I am describing, and what's more, this popular tendency to 'anti' our heroes before they become them could merely be the result of the exigencies of a better plot. Still, I know I prefer my politicians un-power-hungry (utopian as that may seem), why not my detectives too?
But why is it that we should be so keen to have our heroes be unwilling ones? We seem to be uncomfortable with the idea of a detective straightforwardly doing their job. When normally working, our detective is sanctioned by the institution to which they are attached - usually in some way an official representative of society engaged to solve crimes. Indeed, the detective might be said to fulfill a crucially ordering function, restoring truth to society's narrative and eliminating its threatening elements.
Why, then, do we insist on them not wanting to fulfill this function? Rather to fall into it, unwillingly, if inevitably?
One of our earlier detectives in fiction was Dickens' Mr. Bucket from Bleak House, and critics credit him with playing a reformist role that restores justice to English society in the way lawyers (like the dread Tulkinghorn) cannot. In this sense then, the detective emerges as a anti-hero figure who we trust in a position of power precisely because he does not seek it.
Of course, there must be many, notable exceptions to the phenomenon I am describing, and what's more, this popular tendency to 'anti' our heroes before they become them could merely be the result of the exigencies of a better plot. Still, I know I prefer my politicians un-power-hungry (utopian as that may seem), why not my detectives too?
Sunday, 11 December 2011
Going To Stop
Last Monday was my driving test. I won't pretend I wasn't absolutely terrified of failing, because I have quite the history with not passing my driving tests, but I duly took myself down there with enough sleep and enough coffee balanced with fennel tea for calmness.
My wonderfully characterfull driving teacher took me round the test route a few times, telling me repeatedly to 'slow down' until I was going at about 15km per hour. As we reach a stop sign I begin to slow down but don't quite come to a complete stop. In slight panic, he begins to exclaim with increasing volume, "go to stop…go to stop!'
I will not dwell on my confusion at the seeming oxymoron of going to stop, nor on the actual driving test and my panic as the examiner exited the car without a word, and I was left flapping in confusion as to my status like a fish on dry land (in Israel there are laws against telling you whether you passed or not immediately after the test after an instructor was shot by a dissatisfied customer).
No, instead, I will focus on the phrase 'go to stop,' which seems to me to be a typically Israeli expression. This country is a land steeped in contradiction and paradox, of which this sentence is only one example. In practical terms, on the road, I can see this principle at work when Israelis barrel ahead at top speed heading toward a red light where they will only have to decelerate massively (no judgment I do this too).
But perhaps more suggestively we go forward with the idea of a religious-nation state only to have to stop at the limits of trying to combine synagogue and state in the modern world. We fight like mad to have a Jewish state and then find ourselves caught up in defining exactly which kind of Jews we mean. It is, perhaps, a paradox to hold on to a religious identity at all in today's world.
But I would like to think that (especially in today's world where its difficult to legitimately stand up for something) it's an admirable quality to retain one's enthusiasm and forward motion. It's no accident this country has been called 'Start-Up Nation,' and perhaps hurtling towards a red light can sometimes decrease road safety, but at least we make the effort to hurtle towards something at all.
My wonderfully characterfull driving teacher took me round the test route a few times, telling me repeatedly to 'slow down' until I was going at about 15km per hour. As we reach a stop sign I begin to slow down but don't quite come to a complete stop. In slight panic, he begins to exclaim with increasing volume, "go to stop…go to stop!'
I will not dwell on my confusion at the seeming oxymoron of going to stop, nor on the actual driving test and my panic as the examiner exited the car without a word, and I was left flapping in confusion as to my status like a fish on dry land (in Israel there are laws against telling you whether you passed or not immediately after the test after an instructor was shot by a dissatisfied customer).
No, instead, I will focus on the phrase 'go to stop,' which seems to me to be a typically Israeli expression. This country is a land steeped in contradiction and paradox, of which this sentence is only one example. In practical terms, on the road, I can see this principle at work when Israelis barrel ahead at top speed heading toward a red light where they will only have to decelerate massively (no judgment I do this too).
But perhaps more suggestively we go forward with the idea of a religious-nation state only to have to stop at the limits of trying to combine synagogue and state in the modern world. We fight like mad to have a Jewish state and then find ourselves caught up in defining exactly which kind of Jews we mean. It is, perhaps, a paradox to hold on to a religious identity at all in today's world.
But I would like to think that (especially in today's world where its difficult to legitimately stand up for something) it's an admirable quality to retain one's enthusiasm and forward motion. It's no accident this country has been called 'Start-Up Nation,' and perhaps hurtling towards a red light can sometimes decrease road safety, but at least we make the effort to hurtle towards something at all.
Sunday, 4 December 2011
Judging A Book By Its Cover
In the midst of updating favorite book covers on my website, I stumbled across a great site called bookcoverarchive.com. Browsing through their collection of incredible covers made me wish repeatedly that I'd read (at least some of) these books. Every cover was a perfect balance of visual pleasure, narrative cleverness and just enough of an edge of sophistication. Basically - almost exactly what I'd want in a book.
Here are a few of my favorites
And then my personal top pick - grabbing that spot for its cruel relevance and perfect irony...
The problem was, the more the magic of the covers worked on me and the more I longed to read these books, the more I worried about my judgement. Surely we all know not to judge a book by its cover?
Except that actually, it's the only way we do. Marketing books and visiting book stores on a daily basis has, for the first time, put me on the front line of how books get bought, and unfortunately it's not my fabulously written copy or my persuasive presence that sells a book - it's the work of the graphic designer in the studio who may or may not have even read it.
This seems a little crazy, and feel free to disagree, but I can't help feeling that in the age of Facebook profiles and digital cameras we can't really be surprised that the first and last lines of defense are appearances.
[all covers are the copyright of their respective publishers]
Here are a few of my favorites
And then my personal top pick - grabbing that spot for its cruel relevance and perfect irony...
The problem was, the more the magic of the covers worked on me and the more I longed to read these books, the more I worried about my judgement. Surely we all know not to judge a book by its cover?
Except that actually, it's the only way we do. Marketing books and visiting book stores on a daily basis has, for the first time, put me on the front line of how books get bought, and unfortunately it's not my fabulously written copy or my persuasive presence that sells a book - it's the work of the graphic designer in the studio who may or may not have even read it.
This seems a little crazy, and feel free to disagree, but I can't help feeling that in the age of Facebook profiles and digital cameras we can't really be surprised that the first and last lines of defense are appearances.
[all covers are the copyright of their respective publishers]
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Real Vintage Words This Time
Today saw the acquisition of about 60 second-hand English books. My mother and I paid a visit to the ESRA (English Speaking Residents Association) bookshop to do battle with groaning shelves and frayed pages.
Our final selection saw Plato thrown together with John Le Carre, and Defoe's Moll Flanders getting intimate with Holly Golightly and Nabokov's Lolita - keeping good company one and all.
Other pairings were perhaps more appropriate, like a Penn University Press book on The Poetics of Imperialism and Conrad's Lord Jim, or an unencountered Proust novel with R. D. Laing's The Divided Self.
Still, all this heavy literary name-dropping aside, the best thing about this visit was the chance to get my hands on about 10 old Everyman editions of the classics. Some seemed quite random (I won't say completely random because who knows where the holes in my literary historical knowledge might lie), but the main point wasn't to read the books, but to own them.
In my post-kindle (or two) world, the relation between buying books and reading them has changed completely. On Kindle, I will buy on impulse, (it's only '1-Click' after all), virtually fork out the 4.99 GBP and promptly forget all about the book if I don't need to read it for work or for class. It exists on my e-reader and assumedly backed-up somewhere in Amazon's labyrinthine archives, but as far as I'm concerned it might as well not exist in my possession at all - nothing more, really, than an item on my debit card bill.
But real books - on dead trees? Now there's something I'd like to own. Not read, necessarily, but just own. Looking ahead into the e-future of everything, I can't help but think (like most people) that reading an actual book may eventually disappear. But the physical book itself will not. Instead, e-book reading will bring about an increase in the value of a book, as they turn into possessions people want to own for the sake of having them.
Maybe this is awfully sad, the book divorced from its world-building, escapist capabilities, or it's function as a commentary on real life, but looking at my shelf of new, hard-backed, gilt-edged 'possessions', I find it hard to agree.
Monday, 28 November 2011
Assimilation and Driving
How long can you live in a place before it's starts to affect your personality?
It's been over two years that I've lived in Israel and only now do I find myself morphing into an Israeli. It's not that I actively tried not to before, just that I never found myself intensely affected by the difference in culture one way or another. but how strange that I should begin to mimic exactly what irritates me the most.
Simultaneously to raging vociferously (inside my car of course, with the windows tightly shut and sound muffled) about the Israeli need to beep when the traffic light turns orange, or of driving too fast or compulsively needing to change lanes to fill any available gap and get to one's destination that much faster, I drive the exact same way. And the thought of driving any other way makes me rage even more.
Thankfully, I still believe in the sanctity of indicating, or as the Americanized Israeli's put it, 'putting on de blinkerrr', a lost skill that has nearly disappeared from the Israeli road. My parking is also faultless, though I try not to read too much into my obsessive need to stay within the lines. But I wonder how long it will be before I too decide to park on a slant, taking up two bays and sticking my vehicular rear-end into the lot, and before my 'blinkerr' turns off, once, and for all.
It's been over two years that I've lived in Israel and only now do I find myself morphing into an Israeli. It's not that I actively tried not to before, just that I never found myself intensely affected by the difference in culture one way or another. but how strange that I should begin to mimic exactly what irritates me the most.
Simultaneously to raging vociferously (inside my car of course, with the windows tightly shut and sound muffled) about the Israeli need to beep when the traffic light turns orange, or of driving too fast or compulsively needing to change lanes to fill any available gap and get to one's destination that much faster, I drive the exact same way. And the thought of driving any other way makes me rage even more.
Thankfully, I still believe in the sanctity of indicating, or as the Americanized Israeli's put it, 'putting on de blinkerrr', a lost skill that has nearly disappeared from the Israeli road. My parking is also faultless, though I try not to read too much into my obsessive need to stay within the lines. But I wonder how long it will be before I too decide to park on a slant, taking up two bays and sticking my vehicular rear-end into the lot, and before my 'blinkerr' turns off, once, and for all.
Tuesday, 5 January 2010
My Internet Diary: A story in Links
So, ironically, given the title of my blog, this posting is my response to the overload of information I'm currently encountering in my increasing use of the internet. No vintage words here..preserved in a tucked-away second-hand boutique, available only to a select few to whom has been disclosed its secret location. Instead the great leveller, the mass, and the insistently modern.
Previously merely a social networking tool and a basic research facilitator, (i.e. my internet forays confined themselves to Facebook, Google, and Wikipedia), my experience of the net has now, in a classically rapid fashion, expanded enormously.
Now, instead of researching courses to take in universities or academic institutions as a physically present human being, I consider sending my electronic money out into the ether and signing up for online courses, trusting that 'teacher-less' and without fellow students, reliant only a well-stocked 'multimedia' curriculum, I will somehow still qualify myself.
What i will call my 'internet encounters' have also exponentially increased. Instead of running away in panic to bury my head in the sand when confronted with the plethora of youtube videos and online articles and blogs posted and messaged by my friends on Facebook, I am now their avid reader and viewer. Consumer.
In true avant-garde social media style, however, as a consumer I am also implicitly a producer waiting to happen. Hence, assumedly my desire to share with the aforementioned ether the story of my day's internet activity.
Why exactly I feel anyone else would or should in fact be interested in what my personal, and daily experience of the internet is, I dont venture to explain or even examine just yet.
Instead, as a blogger with at least the spurious authority to post as much as I want about that eternal topic - myself - I will, without further ado, give you my
Internet Diary: DAY ONE.
1: I discovered a 'clothing-optional airline'. just the name is great. http://econudes.org/node/266
2: I discovered 2 new amazing websites called wordnik.com and chemistry.com, both as a result of two stellar ted talks (ted.com) I listened to. I highly recommend the personality quiz on chemistry.com. Even if you'd rather not affiliate yourself with a dating site, its definitely worth it to do the test and cheerfully ignore the welcome or unwelcome consequences of now having 'matches' spread across the globe. As for wordnik, I still havent really oriented myself there...but I fully intend to be spending more time on the site, so I will update as and when.
3: During a frantic search, desperately trying to find some music to listen to on Youtube whilst packing, I typed in 'best movie soundtracks' or something similar, and ended up stumbling across some real gems I haven't actually got in my score collection (now numbering around 700 and running out of things I want and dont have). One of these was the 'stoic prison theme' from the Shawshank Redemption (Thomas Newman can always be relied upon to make emotivally powerful though dangerously repetitive themes.) This one, however, is pretty good, and doesnt just let you relax through it. Like the movie, it keeps you riveted and involved, so that you have no choice but to suffer throgh the difficult parts and thrill to the exhilarating ones..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-Vq9dFO0vc
4: In another chance encounter, I came across a mislabelled but fabulous track of the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi on youtube, which i will now have to exert myself to find on iTunes listening to the 30second preview of each likely song until I come to the right one. But until then, who wouldnt want to hear this -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2K7D-uMH2g&feature=related
5: Also, as mentioned above, I found this online copyediting course which I want to take with mediabistro.com, who are also sending me insane amounts of newsletters and blogs and stuff on the latest media and PR news, which I have, apparently, signed up for. One of these concerns itself exclusively with E-Books, which will in 10 years time be called simply 'books' as E-mail gradually proceeded through to email, and eventually graduated up to almost replacing 'mail'.
6: Another of the Ted Talks i listened to was on Metaphor - excellent and well-worth a revisit. it was short, clever, metaphorical of course, and did a good job of making this seemingly arcane literary--grammatical category of language into something highly relevant - even indispensable - to a successful society.
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_geary_metaphorically_speaking.html
Ok, I think that's probably enough for my first day. I feel I might need some assimilative sleep time to process all this new knowledge...just in case the blogging and sharing hasn't worked..
Previously merely a social networking tool and a basic research facilitator, (i.e. my internet forays confined themselves to Facebook, Google, and Wikipedia), my experience of the net has now, in a classically rapid fashion, expanded enormously.
Now, instead of researching courses to take in universities or academic institutions as a physically present human being, I consider sending my electronic money out into the ether and signing up for online courses, trusting that 'teacher-less' and without fellow students, reliant only a well-stocked 'multimedia' curriculum, I will somehow still qualify myself.
What i will call my 'internet encounters' have also exponentially increased. Instead of running away in panic to bury my head in the sand when confronted with the plethora of youtube videos and online articles and blogs posted and messaged by my friends on Facebook, I am now their avid reader and viewer. Consumer.
In true avant-garde social media style, however, as a consumer I am also implicitly a producer waiting to happen. Hence, assumedly my desire to share with the aforementioned ether the story of my day's internet activity.
Why exactly I feel anyone else would or should in fact be interested in what my personal, and daily experience of the internet is, I dont venture to explain or even examine just yet.
Instead, as a blogger with at least the spurious authority to post as much as I want about that eternal topic - myself - I will, without further ado, give you my
Internet Diary: DAY ONE.
1: I discovered a 'clothing-optional airline'. just the name is great. http://econudes.org/node/266
2: I discovered 2 new amazing websites called wordnik.com and chemistry.com, both as a result of two stellar ted talks (ted.com) I listened to. I highly recommend the personality quiz on chemistry.com. Even if you'd rather not affiliate yourself with a dating site, its definitely worth it to do the test and cheerfully ignore the welcome or unwelcome consequences of now having 'matches' spread across the globe. As for wordnik, I still havent really oriented myself there...but I fully intend to be spending more time on the site, so I will update as and when.
3: During a frantic search, desperately trying to find some music to listen to on Youtube whilst packing, I typed in 'best movie soundtracks' or something similar, and ended up stumbling across some real gems I haven't actually got in my score collection (now numbering around 700 and running out of things I want and dont have). One of these was the 'stoic prison theme' from the Shawshank Redemption (Thomas Newman can always be relied upon to make emotivally powerful though dangerously repetitive themes.) This one, however, is pretty good, and doesnt just let you relax through it. Like the movie, it keeps you riveted and involved, so that you have no choice but to suffer throgh the difficult parts and thrill to the exhilarating ones..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-Vq9dFO0vc
4: In another chance encounter, I came across a mislabelled but fabulous track of the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi on youtube, which i will now have to exert myself to find on iTunes listening to the 30second preview of each likely song until I come to the right one. But until then, who wouldnt want to hear this -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2K7D-uMH2g&feature=related
5: Also, as mentioned above, I found this online copyediting course which I want to take with mediabistro.com, who are also sending me insane amounts of newsletters and blogs and stuff on the latest media and PR news, which I have, apparently, signed up for. One of these concerns itself exclusively with E-Books, which will in 10 years time be called simply 'books' as E-mail gradually proceeded through to email, and eventually graduated up to almost replacing 'mail'.
6: Another of the Ted Talks i listened to was on Metaphor - excellent and well-worth a revisit. it was short, clever, metaphorical of course, and did a good job of making this seemingly arcane literary--grammatical category of language into something highly relevant - even indispensable - to a successful society.
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_geary_metaphorically_speaking.html
Ok, I think that's probably enough for my first day. I feel I might need some assimilative sleep time to process all this new knowledge...just in case the blogging and sharing hasn't worked..
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