I've been thinking about critics lately.
The first two assignments my students have to hand in on the course I am teaching this term are book reviews. This might sound easy: it is not. The work they need to produce should be well written, well argued and succinct - the word limit is a very strict five hundred words maximum. Only a very few of them asked before they began their work what the role of the critic in a review is. This is a question which attracts different answers, and over the last few years there have been discussions - in theatre and literature - about who should review work, how, and for what purpose.
On Wednesday evening some friends and I went to see the new production of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin at English National Opera directed by Deborah Warner, whose production of School for Scandal at the Barbican in early summer was badly reviewed by some (not all) critics - to which Warner responded, and a low key, short lived - but media inflated - 'spat' occurred when two critics took this response very poorly and then themselves responded... are you bored already? What always seems to come out of things is an air of critics in one camp and writers, artists, actors, theatre directors - or whatever other artists I have left out - in another, with no real dialogue occurring between them: critics - and the newspapers they write for - do not want to change the way they do things, which leaves everybody feeling frustrated. Warner - I should declare now that I have great respect for her work and have yet to see anything directed by her in the theatre or opera house which I have disliked - seems to have been attempting (I may be entirely wrong about this of course) to get some sort of discussion going for a while, at least since late 2009 when I heard her on BBC Radio 4's current affairs programme PM talking about critics and criticism and role/responsibility of the critic - but consistently the response to this from senior theatre critics has been patronising and condescending if nothing else. Which, for me, is disappointing, because I feel very strongly that this is a discussion which should be had - there must be a way of properly jump-starting this conversation and preventing it from becoming some sort of pathetic newspaper argument. Before my students hand in their next review I will be encouraging them to think about the role of the critic, or rather think about what the responsibility of the critic is, and what they - as writers, critics, readers, and audience members - want from a review.
The production of Onegin is stunningly beautiful (the lighting alone was worth the price of the ticket) and without a doubt the best thing I've seen all year - I would go again every night before the run ends if I could, but I can't so I hope it returns to the Coliseum in the future. There were six of us, each enjoyed it, but from different points of view - at the first interval we had a great discussion about the date the production had settled upon - the story is an 1820s one, but this production was firmly rooted in 1890, and our discussion ranged from Jane Austen to Chekhov via wars, revolutions, 'The New Woman' and Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (one of my favorite films, but it entered our discussion because of the duel in both that film and Onegin) . If you want you can listen to a live recording of it via the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer, but I really do urge you to go an see it if you can.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Links to stuff
I'm going to try to blog more, so if I can't write a proper blog my compromise is going to be to post some links to interesting things (things which I think are interesting and hope you will too).
Quick reminder about my friend Peter Falconer's project to write A Song A Week in 2011. He has ten songs left to write, record and produce - and there aren't ten weeks of the year left so if you haven't already take a look at the SAW2011 blog and give him a comment or two to encourage him, and a few pounds for the charity pot if you can.
High Arctic exhibition at the National Maritime Museum - is a rather extraordinary exhibition conceived by Matt Clark of United Visual Artists after he went on the 2010 Cape Farewell High Arctic expedition. The blogs by the people who went on the expedition can be found here.
BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival is currently happening in Gateshead. Radio 3 broadcast various lectures and events and you can catch up on the iplayer.
And for something absurd and hilarious: French and Saunders Hungarian Madonna Interview (with thanks to Mr Falconer for sending me this link).
Quick reminder about my friend Peter Falconer's project to write A Song A Week in 2011. He has ten songs left to write, record and produce - and there aren't ten weeks of the year left so if you haven't already take a look at the SAW2011 blog and give him a comment or two to encourage him, and a few pounds for the charity pot if you can.
High Arctic exhibition at the National Maritime Museum - is a rather extraordinary exhibition conceived by Matt Clark of United Visual Artists after he went on the 2010 Cape Farewell High Arctic expedition. The blogs by the people who went on the expedition can be found here.
BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival is currently happening in Gateshead. Radio 3 broadcast various lectures and events and you can catch up on the iplayer.
And for something absurd and hilarious: French and Saunders Hungarian Madonna Interview (with thanks to Mr Falconer for sending me this link).
Friday, November 18, 2011
Reading Lists, libraries and beautiful books
Somebody asked me recently what books I'd read recently - I had to think about this, which is unusual as I can usually reel off quite a few without thinking at all. I read everyday, but rarely these are books anyone else would want to read - New Perspectives in Historical Writing, Probing the Limits of Representation, Practicing New Historicism, anyone? Thought not.
To add to this I've been stuck in interminable chapter writing hell since sometime in March, which finally came to an end about ten days ago, but which has meant I've not been able to read anything non-chapter related, mostly because I've just been too tired to read anything else at the end of the day.
This term though I've been teaching a course on contemporary writing, so I've been reading a book a week, and this is the reading list:
Marilynne Robinson - Home
Ali Smith - The First Person and Other Stories
Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger
Michelle Paver - Dark Matter
Jackie Kay - The Red Dust Road
Jackie Kay -Fiere
Jeanette Winterson - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jose Saramargo - The Elephant's Journey
Alex Wheatle - Brenton Brown
Bel Mooney - A Small Dog Saved My Life
In the last week of term the students get to choose the book they want to read. A few of my students raised their hands 'What do we do in week 12?' questions abound. Choose a book you like and suggest it to the rest of the class. 'What?' - none of them could think of a book they had read. What did you read in the summer? Silence. You must have read something. One finally mumbled that he spent the rest of the year reading and so didn't read anything over the summer. What is he doing an English degree for if he doesn't like reading? When I finished my undergraduate degree I was so tired I couldn't read any of the books I loved or wanted to read, but I needed to read something so I trundled my way through all my Dad's crime novels. How can these students spend a whole summer not reading?
I would go crazy if I didn't or wasn't able to read - books have been there at the most difficult and terrible times and I've always used books as a way of escaping the terribleness. When I worked as a bank clerk I used to use my lunch hour to go to the library in the town (whatever town, as I was moved about a lot) where I was based and sit in there and read; it was an hour of grace day on day, week on week while I was doing a job which made me very unhappy; it got me out of the bank and effectively made the job bearable until a job I wanted to do came along. In the last month I have learned four out of the seven public libraries I used have been shut down, two have had their hours cut, and one risks closure.
The Kindle advert may be claiming the thing replaces the book (it doesn't because you can't drop in the the bath for a start, not to mention all the other things, which I won't mention otherwise I will be ranting) but I cannot replace the library: the experience of going into a place filled with books, pulling something off the shelf at random and starting the reading journey. Or going into a library with the reading list for your course and looking at the shelves and pulling books off to find which ones you need, which are interesting or helpful, and which are no good and can go back on the shelf. The rejection process in the academic library is as important as the act of discovery.
I haven't managed to finish AL Kennedy's The Blue Book - I was just too tired and couldn't actually hold the book upright in bed, and decided the book and I would be much happier if we left each other alone for a while. I'll be reading it at Christmas though and I still love looking at it in all its blueness on my shelf. Slight aside - there seems to be a small trend at Vintage/Jonathan Cape at the moment to publish books which have the ends of the pages the same colour as the cover - Julian Barnes' Booker winner has a black hardcover with the ends of the pages also black, and the edges of the dust jacket also black so it sort of melds, the new Vintage edition of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is very orange in the same way that The Blue Book is blue. I wonder if the rise of the Kindle (how much do I hate that TV advert? More than the actual Kindle I think) and the iPad and other assorted e-reader things, has meant that publishers are trying to make (some) effort to produce hardback editions which look beautiful.
After I escaped chapter hell, I started reading Sara Wheeler's wonderful book Terra Incognita, which is about her travels in Antarctica. This is the first non-work book I've read since sometime in the spring. I've never read much travel writing before - there is so much fiction I haven't read, not to mention the poetry, that non-fiction - unless it is really vital and essential - tends to slightly fall off my radar. But this year I started to give in to my desire to read books about the Arctic and Antarctica, starting safely with a travel book about Norway, where I turned immediately to the bit about the Arctic Circle, and then picked up a copy of a novel called The Still Point whilst traveling to a conference in Exeter which I read in huge gulps on the train there and back, along with an article about the Northern Lights in the Saturday Guardian Magazine someone had left on the seat of the train from Exeter. Chapter hell began, along with some other awful things and my snow and ice filled reading dreams had to wait; I'm back there now and loving it.
I'm off to jump down another chapter black hole - I may be some time.
To add to this I've been stuck in interminable chapter writing hell since sometime in March, which finally came to an end about ten days ago, but which has meant I've not been able to read anything non-chapter related, mostly because I've just been too tired to read anything else at the end of the day.
This term though I've been teaching a course on contemporary writing, so I've been reading a book a week, and this is the reading list:
Marilynne Robinson - Home
Ali Smith - The First Person and Other Stories
Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger
Michelle Paver - Dark Matter
Jackie Kay - The Red Dust Road
Jackie Kay -Fiere
Jeanette Winterson - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jose Saramargo - The Elephant's Journey
Alex Wheatle - Brenton Brown
Bel Mooney - A Small Dog Saved My Life
In the last week of term the students get to choose the book they want to read. A few of my students raised their hands 'What do we do in week 12?' questions abound. Choose a book you like and suggest it to the rest of the class. 'What?' - none of them could think of a book they had read. What did you read in the summer? Silence. You must have read something. One finally mumbled that he spent the rest of the year reading and so didn't read anything over the summer. What is he doing an English degree for if he doesn't like reading? When I finished my undergraduate degree I was so tired I couldn't read any of the books I loved or wanted to read, but I needed to read something so I trundled my way through all my Dad's crime novels. How can these students spend a whole summer not reading?
I would go crazy if I didn't or wasn't able to read - books have been there at the most difficult and terrible times and I've always used books as a way of escaping the terribleness. When I worked as a bank clerk I used to use my lunch hour to go to the library in the town (whatever town, as I was moved about a lot) where I was based and sit in there and read; it was an hour of grace day on day, week on week while I was doing a job which made me very unhappy; it got me out of the bank and effectively made the job bearable until a job I wanted to do came along. In the last month I have learned four out of the seven public libraries I used have been shut down, two have had their hours cut, and one risks closure.
The Kindle advert may be claiming the thing replaces the book (it doesn't because you can't drop in the the bath for a start, not to mention all the other things, which I won't mention otherwise I will be ranting) but I cannot replace the library: the experience of going into a place filled with books, pulling something off the shelf at random and starting the reading journey. Or going into a library with the reading list for your course and looking at the shelves and pulling books off to find which ones you need, which are interesting or helpful, and which are no good and can go back on the shelf. The rejection process in the academic library is as important as the act of discovery.
I haven't managed to finish AL Kennedy's The Blue Book - I was just too tired and couldn't actually hold the book upright in bed, and decided the book and I would be much happier if we left each other alone for a while. I'll be reading it at Christmas though and I still love looking at it in all its blueness on my shelf. Slight aside - there seems to be a small trend at Vintage/Jonathan Cape at the moment to publish books which have the ends of the pages the same colour as the cover - Julian Barnes' Booker winner has a black hardcover with the ends of the pages also black, and the edges of the dust jacket also black so it sort of melds, the new Vintage edition of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is very orange in the same way that The Blue Book is blue. I wonder if the rise of the Kindle (how much do I hate that TV advert? More than the actual Kindle I think) and the iPad and other assorted e-reader things, has meant that publishers are trying to make (some) effort to produce hardback editions which look beautiful.
After I escaped chapter hell, I started reading Sara Wheeler's wonderful book Terra Incognita, which is about her travels in Antarctica. This is the first non-work book I've read since sometime in the spring. I've never read much travel writing before - there is so much fiction I haven't read, not to mention the poetry, that non-fiction - unless it is really vital and essential - tends to slightly fall off my radar. But this year I started to give in to my desire to read books about the Arctic and Antarctica, starting safely with a travel book about Norway, where I turned immediately to the bit about the Arctic Circle, and then picked up a copy of a novel called The Still Point whilst traveling to a conference in Exeter which I read in huge gulps on the train there and back, along with an article about the Northern Lights in the Saturday Guardian Magazine someone had left on the seat of the train from Exeter. Chapter hell began, along with some other awful things and my snow and ice filled reading dreams had to wait; I'm back there now and loving it.
I'm off to jump down another chapter black hole - I may be some time.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
What's in a title?
I had a meeting this afternoon about a paper I am giving at a research seminar on a panel with two of my friends and colleagues in March. Our research is quite varied and does not really link up in anyway - one of us is researching scientific writing and the Royal Society in the 17th/18th century, another on the East India Company Archive 17th-19th century, and my research is on Stephen Poliakoff, which puts me firmly in the late 20th/21st century.
There is, however, one area in which we are all interested and have talked about with varying degrees of intellectual depth: the archive. But none of us could face yet another panel on this subject and have happily discovered that we are also interested in the anecdote - so that will be our general subject for our panel.
From there we had to write a title for our panel - this sounds easier than it actually is.
In today's lecture for the course I teach on we were discussing contemporary publishing in all its glory and shallowness, and one of the questions was about whether we read a book because of its title. To our surprise none of the students said they were attracted to a book by a title - other factors were more important for them, particularly front covers it seems, so that old saying about judging and covers never goes away. But do we judge a book, or a play, or opera, or an art exhibition, or a film, or a song, or whatever else, by its title? What impact does a title have? Do we learn anything from a title?
We decided our panel title needed to have a colon - the colon in academic paper titles is all. Or not. I still maintain my best title was a two word title for a paper on AL Kennedy - Writing Home - now though I have long wordy titles with quotes and colons. We wanted something about fragments in our title to reflect the fragmentary, shard like, nature of the anecdotes and anecdotal stories and incidents we would be discussing. The only thing which came to mind over and over again was 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins' - the famous line which comes four lines before the end of the fifth section - What the Thunder Said - of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and while I'm talking about titles, it is interesting to observe the reason why the European Parliament wouldn't allow Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw to stage The Waste Land in their new parliament building in Brussels was because the powers that be didn't care for the title...What if T.S. Eliot had kept the title he originally considered - He Do the Police in Different Voices? Or on a less dramatic level if Ian McEwan had maintained the original title of Atonement so that it was An Atonement - it was his publisher who wanted it to be just Atonement and McEwan relented.
'These fragments I have shored against my ruins' is an incredible line, but one which we could not use: how could we?
The line has been haunting me for the rest of the day, and whilst I listened to a paper on mourning this evening it kept returning: 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins'.
Eventually we came across a fantastic Francis Bacon (Bacon senior, the 16th century statesman, not the 20th century painter) quote: 'Out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books, and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time'. But this was too long, so after a bit of chopping and twisting we came up with 'Recovering from the deluge of Time' as our before the colon bit of the title. We liked it, but while we were trying to work out the post colon bit, we started playing around with a (mis)quote from Paul Simon's song 'You can call me Al'. So now we had 'Incidents and Accidents, Hints and Allegations'... we stuck with it, but I do wonder a little bit if we cheated. We had moved away from our desire for fragments, the Bacon quote seemed a long way away, but I like it so much I know I have to use it at some point.
What is in a title? Would you read a book just because of its title? Or see a play?
There is, however, one area in which we are all interested and have talked about with varying degrees of intellectual depth: the archive. But none of us could face yet another panel on this subject and have happily discovered that we are also interested in the anecdote - so that will be our general subject for our panel.
From there we had to write a title for our panel - this sounds easier than it actually is.
In today's lecture for the course I teach on we were discussing contemporary publishing in all its glory and shallowness, and one of the questions was about whether we read a book because of its title. To our surprise none of the students said they were attracted to a book by a title - other factors were more important for them, particularly front covers it seems, so that old saying about judging and covers never goes away. But do we judge a book, or a play, or opera, or an art exhibition, or a film, or a song, or whatever else, by its title? What impact does a title have? Do we learn anything from a title?
We decided our panel title needed to have a colon - the colon in academic paper titles is all. Or not. I still maintain my best title was a two word title for a paper on AL Kennedy - Writing Home - now though I have long wordy titles with quotes and colons. We wanted something about fragments in our title to reflect the fragmentary, shard like, nature of the anecdotes and anecdotal stories and incidents we would be discussing. The only thing which came to mind over and over again was 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins' - the famous line which comes four lines before the end of the fifth section - What the Thunder Said - of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and while I'm talking about titles, it is interesting to observe the reason why the European Parliament wouldn't allow Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw to stage The Waste Land in their new parliament building in Brussels was because the powers that be didn't care for the title...What if T.S. Eliot had kept the title he originally considered - He Do the Police in Different Voices? Or on a less dramatic level if Ian McEwan had maintained the original title of Atonement so that it was An Atonement - it was his publisher who wanted it to be just Atonement and McEwan relented.
'These fragments I have shored against my ruins' is an incredible line, but one which we could not use: how could we?
The line has been haunting me for the rest of the day, and whilst I listened to a paper on mourning this evening it kept returning: 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins'.
Eventually we came across a fantastic Francis Bacon (Bacon senior, the 16th century statesman, not the 20th century painter) quote: 'Out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books, and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time'. But this was too long, so after a bit of chopping and twisting we came up with 'Recovering from the deluge of Time' as our before the colon bit of the title. We liked it, but while we were trying to work out the post colon bit, we started playing around with a (mis)quote from Paul Simon's song 'You can call me Al'. So now we had 'Incidents and Accidents, Hints and Allegations'... we stuck with it, but I do wonder a little bit if we cheated. We had moved away from our desire for fragments, the Bacon quote seemed a long way away, but I like it so much I know I have to use it at some point.
What is in a title? Would you read a book just because of its title? Or see a play?
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