TOP 100 BOOK SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Siegfried Sassoon's manuscripts go online The first ever online collection of the manuscripts, photos and letters of Siegfried Sassoon, launched this Armistice day, focuses on his war poetry"Write again, write again. I'm not dead yet. I've got weeks and weeks to live," writes Siegfried Sassoon in a letter from France in 1918, made available online today by Oxford University to mark this year's Armistice day.In the letter to his friend Robert Nichols, Sassoon writes "what a pity it is that we can't change places for a fortnight. Here am I, aching for a quiet house to hide in and get poems off my chest". A new poem by Nichols "doesn't stir [Sassoon] greatly", with the occasional phrase such as "starlight's sheen" giving him "faint discomfort". Sassoon attributes this to a meeting with his fellow poet Robert Graves – "since I met R Graves I've been warned off so many poetical epithets," he writes.The war poet also comments on a new sonnet by Wilfred Owen – "dear little Wilfred" – which is "not up to his form". Sassoon met Owen in Craiglockhart war hospital near Edinburgh in 1917, where he was sent to be treated for neurasthenia after writing his "declaration against the war". Graves had been instrumental in Sassoon's move to Craiglockhart, fearing the declaration would lead the poet to be court-martialled."I have faith in him," Sassoon says of Owen. "He will do well if you and RG look after him, and stop him writing preciosities ... Have you seen him yet? Craiglockhart gave me two friends – he, and Rivers [the psychiatrist WHR Rivers], whom I adore."The letter is included in the first ever online collection of the manuscripts of Sassoon, which was launched today. It focuses on his war poetry with manuscripts of poems such as "The General" and "Died of Wounds" as well as photographs and letters. The Nichols letter includes a draft of Sassoon's poem "I Stood With the Dead". "Here's my only poem for ages – is it any good?" he asks, before launching into "I stood with the Dead, so forsaken and still / when dawn was grey I stood with the Dead - / and my slow heart said, 'you must kill; you must kill; / 'Soldier, soldier; morning is red.'"Reassembled from collections around the world, the Sassoon manuscripts show the corrections and changes the poet made to his poems, including manuscript variants of his anthologies The Old Huntsman (1917), Counter-Attack (1918), and Picture Show (1919). He scores a dark line through a repetition of the line "And war's a bloody game" in the poem "Aftermath", underlining "Have you forgotten yet? … / Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you'll never forget.""It is fascinating being able to see the corrections and crossings-out he made to the manuscripts. It is invaluable to researchers studying the literature of the war and provides a rich resource to enhance both teaching and learning of the period," said Dr Stuart Lee , the director of the archive.Sassoon's biographer Lord Max Egremont added that "to see such impressive images of these original manuscripts of poems and letters is both moving and salutary – a reminder of the poets' ordeal and the power of their writing". Sassoon joined his battalion in France on 17 November 1915, securing a frontline placement in March 1916 and receiving a Military Cross for his actions during a raid in May 1916. In April 1917 he was wounded by a sniper and, during his recovery in England, wrote his "declaration against the war". "I believe that this war, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest," he wrote. "I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise."Sassoon was sent to serve in Palestine in February 1918, but by May was back in France, and was later shot in the head after he was mistaken for a German by a sentry from his own company. He died aged 80 in 1967.The collection can be viewed online here: oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/sassoon.First world warAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Happy eleventy-first, CS Lewis Narnia's creator deserves far more respect than he currently enjoysClive Staples Lewis, whose 111th birthday would have been celebrated on Sunday 29 November, can lay claim to being one of the key English intellectual authors of the mid-20th century. His work on philosophy, theology and English literature – in particular his studies of Milton and the poetry of the 16th-century – would have ensured his legacy, even if the views he expresses are unfashionable nowadays. But it's his fiction on which his claim truly rests, despite its being marginalised in discussions that tend to celebrate "serious" work for adults over innovative and influential books for children. It was Lewis's time with the Oxford literary group the Inklings in the late 1930s that led to the extraordinary flowering of his literary talent in the creation of Narnia. The group famously also included in their number JRR Tolkien (whose hobbit Bilbo Baggins leaves the Shire on his 111th – "eleventy-first" – birthday in The Lord of the Rings). Like Tolkien, Lewis has since suffered from the widespread dismissal of genre fiction; it's ironic that both authors were themselves complicit in creating a model of culture in which certain elite writers (Edmund Spenser, Milton, the Beowulf poet) were lauded above all others. The marginalisation of children's fiction and work including fantasy of any kind has led to a lack of serious consideration of their work. This is a shame, and a missed opportunity. Lewis is in many ways the heir to Milton and Spenser, making serious work about religious themes and attempting to comprehend the universe through theological eyes. The Narnia stories certainly have elements of Christian allegory – it's impossible to deny the links between Aslan's resurrection and Christ's in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or the parallels with Revelation in that most problematic of books, The Last Battle – yet they also incorporate moments from epic poetry, from mythology, and from idealised national history. They draw on astrology, travel writing and Celtic myths, and demonstrate a nascent anti-modernist appeal to nature and ecology; in their courtliness and love of bucolic nature, they also echo Spenser, of whose work Lewis was an expert student. It would be remiss, then, only to see Christian allegory at the heart of the series. My favourites are those that move away from the suffocating middle-class Pevensie family and veer to strange adventure and hardship – the suffering of Shasta in A Horse and His Boy (1954), the swash-buckling and adventure of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), and the ambiguities of The Silver Chair (1953). They haven't been well served by the recent film franchise, which has chosen to concentrate on set-piece battle scenes (it's anyone's guess how they'll deal with the complex and at times deeply problematic narrative in The Last Battle). Lewis's febrile imagination and creation of a challenging, thoughtful and wide-ranging series paved the way for, for instance, Philip Pullman's extraordinary apocalypses in The Amber Spyglass (2000). Sadly, like Pullman, he will ever be dismissed as a writer who "only" managed to entertain, provoke and inspire children through his writing.CS LewisChildren and teenagersFictionJerome de Grootguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel Raj Patel is right that we need to rethink our notions of value, but his solutions for a better world do not convince John GrayEconomists are taken seriously by governments because they claim to be practising a type of science that can predict the future and help manage our lives. Yet very few economists forecast the current crisis and it is hard to think of any economist who has come up with compelling ideas about how to deal with it. Underpinning all the stimulus programmes is the faith that if only we can restart growth of the sort that was suddenly curtailed two years ago, all will be well. But growth of that kind – debt-fuelled expansion that inflates the value of financial assets while depleting the material environment – is what got us into the present mess. If this is the best economists can do, it is hard to avoid concluding that there is something basically wrong with their discipline.Part of the problem is the belief that price and value are for most purposes one and the same. This equation makes it possible for them to develop impressive-looking mathematical models of the economy, but it involves a huge oversimplification of reality. As Raj Patel explains in this penetrating and admirably concise guide to the follies of market fundamentalism, the notion that the value of a good is its price obscures the complexity of markets and of human beings. Theories of efficient markets take the shifting abstractions generated by the price mechanism as actually existing entities but, as Patel puts it, using one of many vivid metaphors that stud his argument, this is like being in the simulated world of The Matrix, surrounded by "a digital rain of symbols and signs".The seeming precision of the computer screen suggests that something substantial is being measured and exchanged, when in fact what is being traded are virtual assets whose relations with actual resources are tangled and hidden: "Data pelting down monitors is what the masters of the universe on the global financial exchanges stare at, their eyes darting from screen to screen, trying to see through the world and profit from it."Contrary to the claims of economists, the belief that price equals value is not science, an accurate representation of the world, but ideology – a way of obfuscating the world. Even some well-known economists have been forced to accept that their discipline is shaped by ideological thinking. Patel quotes Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve and one-time follower of the novelist and free-market prophet Ayn Rand, admitting before a Congressional committee in October 2008 that his "view of the world" was "not right". As Greenspan put it: "I found a flaw in the model that I perceived in the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak." This statement is characteristically turgid and Delphic, but the message shows through: he truly believed in the ideology of the efficient market.The same is true of many of those who were involved in decisions leading up to the financial crisis. Most were not cynics who espoused a view of the world they knew to be mistaken in order to rationalise their greed. Often very clever, they were captivated by their own theories. It came as quite a shock when these theories were demolished by events.Much of what passes as economics is ideology and ideology only works if those who produce it also believe in it. The difficulty of the present situation comes from the fact that while few any longer believe in the free market, no one has an alternative to it that is able to command widespread support. Predictably, the financial storm has jolted moribund Marxist theories back into a semblance of life, but there is no popular interest in overthrowing capitalism. The idea of a post-market economy is today what it has been for decades: an intellectual toy rather than a serious political project.For all his forensic dissection of free market thinking, this is a predicament that Patel cannot escape. The first half of The Value of Nothing, showing the unreality of efficient markets and Homo economicus, continues the demolition of market fundamentalism that events have set in train. The second section, where Patel discusses options to the hegemony of the market, is markedly less convincing. He gives examples of local resistance – shack-dwellers in Durban demanding the right legally to settle on public land, participatory budgeting by popular assemblies in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and numerous other cases where he believes new forms of common life are emerging. But when oppressed minorities have improved their lot, will they not want to live as most people in affluent societies do?Patel fails to confront the most fundamental contemporary fact, which is that the majority of people in every country clearly want a type of economy – the sort that rich countries have enjoyed in the recent past – that the planet cannot sustain. A passionate activist, he believes problems of resource scarcity are man-made and can always be solved by fairer distribution. However, the growth-oriented lifestyle of rich countries is not unsustainable because it is unjust; it is unsustainable because the Earth's resources are unalterably finite. It may be true that the imbalance between human demands and the environment could be diminished if enough people rejected material affluence as their main goal in life. But this is an extremely nebulous possibility and one that highlights the deepest difficulty for Patel's analysis.Oscar Wilde may have been right that people know the price of everything and the value of nothing, a remark Patel cites at the start of his book, and which gives him its title. But what is value if it is not price? It is telling that when trying to flesh out a non-market account, Patel turns to religion, in this case Buddhism. The Buddhist tradition gives him what he needs – an understanding of human wellbeing that does not centre round the satisfaction of wants. Like the ancient European Stoic and Epicurean philosophies, Buddhism proposes that happiness lies in shrinking the self – in giving up our wants, rather than forever chasing after them. It is a thought that occurs to many well-off people from time to time, but it is hard to imagine large numbers of people ever acting on it.Theories of value that focus on curbing desire run up against the demand for self-realisation, which is one of the strongest impulses in modern life. To be sure, the pursuit of self-realisation does not often result in happiness. But is it happiness that most people are pursuing? Or is it stimulus and excitement? In the Himalayan Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, Patel informs the reader, the introduction of satellite television has been followed by a crime wave. He seems to think this fact somehow strengthens his argument. But what it tells us is that no culture can now resist the dangerous charms of a life spent in insatiable desire.John Gray's False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, first published in 1998, has been reissued with a new introduction by Granta BooksBusiness and financeFinancial crisisJohn Grayguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Road | Film Review A stark adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel brings out all its harrowing yet ultimately life-enhancing qualities, writes Philip FrenchIn the past, some of it not too distant, people the world over have thought during times of plague and famine that they were living in the last days of our planet. For most of us today, such visions are of a future where a nuclear holocaust, global warming or some other man-created calamity threaten the imminent end of life on earth. In his masterpiece, The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman brought together both experiences by projecting the nuclear angst of the 1950s (a major cinematic subject at the time) on to a Sweden of the Middle Ages visited by the black death. Earlier, the 1936 film based on HG Wells's Things To Come foresaw a world war in 1940 that would return Britain to a dark age of tribes battling for depleted resources.Such movies are now highly fashionable and the heavyweight film version of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, first published in 2006 (and his third to be filmed after All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men) comes in the wake of three relatively lightweight movies covering similar territory released over the past 10 weeks. In the Canadian movie, Pontypool, an apocalyptic outbreak of cannibalism, seemingly carried by language itself, is reported from a small-town radio station in the basement of a deconsecrated church. The premise of Zombieland, an exercise in pitiless black humour, is that most of the population of America has been wiped out by a form of mad cow disease. Co-directed in the States by two Spanish film-makers, Carriers is a low-budget horror flick in which four young Americans drive towards the Gulf of Mexico across a country ravaged by a deadly virus that has no known cure.McCarthy's novel, adapted by the British playwright Joe Penhall and directed by the Australian-based John Hillcoat, offers no explanation of how the world was reduced to a dark, desolate, inhospitable, uncivilised place, most of its flora and fauna destroyed and its few human survivors wandering alone or travelling with small bands of cannibalistic marauders. Food and drinkable water are scarce and viciously fought over. Snow and rain are incessant. Everything is covered by a choking ash. The sky is constantly overcast. The actual place is not named and though we infer that it's America, we feel it's more the crossroads where Vladimir and Estragon meet by their leafless tree or the blasted heath on which Lear and his fellow outcasts gather.McCarthy calls his two central characters simply "the man" (Viggo Mortensen) and "the boy" (Kodi Smit-McPhee), both lower case, a father and his son aged seven or eight, conceived before and born shortly after the unidentified catastrophe. The father has dreams of his wife (Charlize Theron) from which he awakes with sudden pain, for thinking of the past is almost unendurable. We learn that she deserted them, going out into the cold to die partly in the manner of Captain Oates, partly because she could not face the future.The movie was shot on location in Oregon, Pennsylvania, Florida and Louisiana (using some areas shattered by hurricane Katrina) and Hillcoat, his designers and his versatile Spanish cinematographer, Javier Aguirresarobe, have created a world both abstract and gut-wrenchingly real that exactly matches McCarthy's grim terrain. And it is accompanied by a plangent, minimalist score by Hillcoat's regular collaborator Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.Against this background, the journeying man and boy, pushing their supermarket trolley with their pathetic belongings southwards to the sea and supposed salvation, are both real, breathing characters and archetypal figures from an allegorical journey like those in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress or Ibsen's Peer Gynt. Both Mortensen and Smit-McPhee act with their eyes, which sparkle in the surrounding gloom.Each encounter they have – with an old man, a thief, a gang of cannibals, a deadly archer – seems like a threatening accident. Each place they visit, including the man's childhood home, has an ominous atmosphere. But these people and places always have an exemplary, emblematic function, explaining the ethical and philosophical implications of the pilgrimage and deepening the relationship between the father and son.Initially, the man, so solicitous and unselfish with regard to the boy, seems almost saintly. But gradually we realise that it is he who is being morally crippled by the experience and that the boy, who has known no other world, carries within himself a natural decency, an untarnished human concern for his fellow man. It is this, rather than a somewhat contrived ending, that makes the film not merely bearable, but affirmative and life-enhancing.The movie touches gracefully on religion in an unsanctimonious manner in the man's references to God, the campfire discussions between the father and the old man (played by Robert Duvall) who briefly joins them, giving his name as the Old Testament prophet Eli, and in a crucial scene set in a shattered church. There are also allusions to the western novels associated with McCarthy: the man has raised the boy to see people as "good guys" and "bad guys", though there's a clear irony in this. There's also what appears to be a reference to that great novel of isolation, Robinson Crusoe, in a key sequence where the man swims out to a wrecked ship to find what might be salvaged and returns to discover that a sad, bereft black man (Man Friday, we assume) has made off with all their possessions.The Road is a very fine film that inevitably falls somewhat short of the novel. McCarthy is often spoken of as a follower of William Faulkner, but in this case he seems closer to another American writer raised on the King James Bible, Ernest Hemingway. The short, declarative sentences, some only a few words long and without verbs, have a powerful austerity. The man's thoughts, the pared dialogue and the authorial narrative voice flow seamlessly in a manner no visual style could match.DramaCormac McCarthyPhilip Frenchguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
'Spenser' novelist Robert Parker dies in Mass. Robert Parker, the author of the popular Spenser novels about a hard-nosed Boston private investigator, has died. He was 77. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |