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| Sexblogger's tale: How my life changed forever | Zoe Margolis It's not easy being outed. Three years ago I was doorstepped by the Sunday Times; as I opened my front door, a secret photographer took photos of me. The paper then threatened to use these in their exposé of me, in the hope I would succumb to vanity and agree to an interview and photoshoot. The spread ran – without my contributing to it – two days later and the three years of anonymity I had as the author of the sexblog Girl with a One Track Mind was lost in an instant.For the next week, tabloid newspaper journalists and photographers stalked my house and doorstepped my neighbours; harassed my parents; turned up at my workplace; made enquiries at my old college; and offered money to arbitrary acquaintances of mine to dish dirt on me. They even contacted people I knew on Friends Reunited, asking them to spill the beans. I went into hiding, unable to cope with the press onslaught and felt like I was on the verge of a breakdown. Finally, I ended up doing an interview with the Guardian because I thought that might take the heat off the "story". It did: the paparazzi departed and the tabloids stopped calling. But my life, as I knew it, was forever changed; I am still piecing it back together even now.With the news of fellow sexblogger Belle de Jour's true identity being revealed, again in the Sunday Times, as Brooke Magnanti, I'm sure her life will change, too. Unlike me, it seems it was her choice to out herself ; she gave the paper an in-depth interview. On Twitter she says: "We went to the Times willingly, after the Mail had their reporters warned off my work premises by the police," so evidently her hand was still pushed into revealing her identity and giving the paper their "exclusive".But Magnanti seems at ease with her unmasking: "It's time. I don't mind what happens about coming out; I don't want this massive secret over me any more." I can relate to that: having to keep up a facade with everyone in your life is exhausting. I wonder, though, if she's ready for the inevitable media blitz and prepared for every part of her life to be held up to public scrutiny. Things will die down in the press once the story is no longer fresh news, but with one quick click on Google, Magnanti's legacy as the formerly anonymous prostitute Belle de Jour will continue to live on; sadly that may impact her life in ways she could not possibly predict Girl with a One Track Mind: Exposed by Zoe Margolis, will be published by Pan Macmillan, March 2010.BloggingInternetZoe Margolisguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Bad sex award goes to Jonathan Littell Bad sex judges pay tribute to 'part-genius' of winning novel and hope winner 'takes it in good humour'The American winner of the Prix Goncourt, Jonathan Littell, has added another feather to his cap. His novel, The Kindly Ones, was tonight announced as the winner of the Literary Review's 2009 bad sex in fiction award.The Kindly Ones, which tells the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of one of the executioners, beat off stiff competition from a stellar shortlist that included entries from Philip Roth, John Banville, Paul Theroux and the literary rock star Nick Cave.The judges paid tribute to the novel's breadth and ambition, calling it "in part, a work of genius"."However," the citation continued, "a mythologically inspired passage and lines such as 'I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg' clinched the award for The Kindly Ones. We hope he takes it in good humour."According to Jonathan Beckman at the Literary Review, The Kindly Ones is the first work in translation to win the award, set up by Auberon Waugh in 1993 to "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it".The Kindly Ones was originally written in French, where it was published as Les bienveillantes in 2006, and went on to sell more than 1m copies across the continent and win the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary honour.The Goncourt judges were clearly unconcerned by the section which caught the Bad Sex judges' eye, in which Littell draws a comparison between a woman's genitalia and "a Gorgon's head ... a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks"."If only I could still get hard, I thought," the winning passage continues, "I could use my prick like a stake hardened in the fire, and blind this Polyphemus who made me Nobody. But my cock remained inert, I seemed turned to stone."According to Beckman, Littell has no plans to attend the award ceremony. Last year's winner was Rachel Johnson for her novel Shire Hell. Previous winners of the famous plaster foot include Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and Sebastian Faulks.Bad sex awardFictionAwards and prizesRichard Leaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Letters: A picture of privatised streets and plain-clothes police Democratic, rather than private landlord, control of the streets (These cities within cities are eating up Britain's streets, 16 December) was a sine qua non when Camden council was negotiating the King's Cross development (2002-06). We saw the new King's Cross as an integral part of the borough. That included ensuring that a notorious crime hotspot was integrated into the successful action the council and the police were taking on antisocial behaviour to transform the area and its reputation.King's Cross today is becoming a real success story and an example of how concerted time, community effort and money can really make a difference. But this comes with a cost, and I fear those councils seeking quick savings over longer-term policy considerations may not see public control of the streets in any new developments as such a key priority.Cllr Theo BlackwellExecutive member for regeneration 2003-2006, London borough of Camden• Your photographer readers (Snap that tested terror laws, 12 December) might like to know that the British Library's January-to-March 2010 Exhibitions and Events catalogue (full details at www.shootexperience.com) invites groups of four photographers to join them on Saturday 10 February to construct themed photographs of the King's Cross area.George SmithHove, East Sussex • Nemo Halperin (Letters, 15 December) was stopped when taking pictures by plain-clothes police officers. A euphemism for secret police?Peter Le MareGrange-over-Sands, Cumbria• If I were a terrorist, I would set up my easel and make a detailed watercolour or pencil drawing of my target building. The police would never guess I was up to no good.Tom VoutePurley, Surrey • I was stopped and searched twice near London City airport – for watercolouring! I was not even facing the airport. I was painting the Tate and Lyle sugar factory opposite. They said they saw me on a camera and thought that "no one would want to paint a factory". I explained that LS Lowry did loads. Then they said I could be an anarchist and I was carrying "suspicious paraphernalia" – this being a flask of coffee and an iPod. Oh, and a box of watercolours.Once they had all my gear out, rummaged through what identity documentation I had and double-checked it on a few radios, they were satisfied I was just "weird" and left me to it. Until the next week, when I went back to finish off the picture and had to go through the same rigmarole all over again.I have painted in Ukraine, Russia, Vietnam and plenty of other "controlled" states, and have never been questioned about watercolour anarchism.Liam O'FarrellLondonCivil libertiesPhotographyPaintingDevelopmentBritish LibraryPoliceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Reading between the lines of your relationship Do book lovers get a literary leg-up in matters of emotional intelligence, or are the best partners the ones without the library cards?Reading is in many ways a personal odyssey. Stories spread themselves slowly through the territories of our experience and seed ideas that grow privately, organically, over many years. But there's a public aspect to reading, too - most notably the conversations we share with other readers. For many people, reading is a social event as well as a private practice. Which leads one to wonder about the place of reading in our most intimate relationships. What difference does it make in a relationship if both partners are notorious readers, or if one partner reads voraciously while the other has no interest in literature? Does "must love books" represent a categorical imperative, an optional extra or a quality of no consequence in a book lover's search for an ideal partner?As a young adult, I thought the best woman for me was the one who most accurately reflected my own interests. My ideal woman loved all the things I loved and hated all the things that I hated. As I grew older, though, my ideals changed, and for the past eight years I've been in a relationship with a woman who does not read literature at all. She is intelligent, compassionate, funny and very strong, but she's read just one work of fiction in eight years (White Teeth, which I gave her last summer, and which she enjoyed).I occasionally miss not being able to discuss books, but it doesn't bother me as I once thought it would, and this has made me wonder: what did I think were the hypothetical ball-park benefits of having a partner who read books? And how were these perceived benefits qualified by some wider reality?Firstly, I suppose, reading literature offers a couple a shared passion: something that connects them, even when they have differing opinions about the same author or book, and offers them a chance to compare and widen their learning. Reading literature can also give humans a stronger understanding of and empathy for others. As Atticus Finch tells his daughter Scout, you can never really understand people until you step inside their shoes. Great literature gives us the power to imagine what the world is like for people whose lives are vastly different from our own: it can challenge our prejudices and, if we're lucky, make us a little wiser, offering us a deeper understanding of what it sometimes means to be a living, individual human being.On the other hand, there's ample evidence that voracious readers aren't always wise or empathetic characters. Hitler's library contained more than 16,000 volumes. Perhaps they were simply acquired and shelved to make an impression, given that his frequent expressions of megalomaniacal evil did not suggest the character of a quiet, settled, empathetic reader. Much has been made of Hitler's inappropriate appropriation of Nietzsche's philosophy, but I feel quite certain that if Hitler read Nietzsche at all, he must have skimmed over all the important bits, like Otto in A Fish Called Wanda.Hitler is, of course, an extreme example - but fanatical readers with less fanatical persuasions can still be quite difficult to handle. Lovers of literature might feel tremendous empathy for humanity, but they don't always like other people very much. Literature doesn't produce happy endings with the regularity of the Hollywood dream factory because reality is, for so many of us, filled with pain and suffering. Perhaps, as a consequence, readers are less inclined to gloss over life's painful realities, and suffer for it; they can become slightly bruised, cynical and worldly-wise. You might know some readers like this: they despair at the world's ignorance and cruelty, they expect everything to go to the dogs (again) soon enough, and they see through the mass cliches of the commercial world.Readers can also be lofty and pompous in a chin-scratching, horizon-gazing, sonorously stultifying manner. They might groan pleasantly whenever you make a pointed observation, and then quote a line from Goethe's Faust to show you that he had observed the same thing some 300 years earlier, only in rhyming couplets and with better diction.I do believe that people who read a lot are able to articulate their feelings with greater clarity. They have richer vocabularies and can adopt the ideas and expressions of great writers for themselves. Adults mimic, just as kids do, only in more complex ways: we all try to understand emotions through the cracked kettle of language, but it's a mug's game, by and large, because nobody really understands emotions in a rational sense. When someone else uses words to describe emotions in a way that seems to illuminate a powerful truth about our existence, therefore, we tend to store up their words for future use; the quality of the expressions we borrow depends on the quality of the stories we consume, or the people we listen to. The people I know who are most expressive, exact, and interesting when talking about their feelings or the feelings of others, for example, are almost all great readers. But then, love isn't really about how well we can illuminate our feelings with words, is it? If it were, Humbert Humbert would be universally held up as a lover par excellence. If you're a keen reader I'm sure it's wonderful to have a literature-loving partner, but things like honesty, integrity and trust are surely more important in a relationship, are they not?FictionEvan Maloneyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
John Keats | Andrew Motion The first two generations of Romantic poets lived through a time of extraordinary upheaval. The French Revolution and the acceleration of the Industrial Revolution led to unprecedented changes in the cultural and political structures of European society. The majority of poets writing through this period reflect these changes in their work. The young Wordsworth and Coleridge are deeply involved in the life of their times; Blake is a fiery radical – an outsider attacking the status quo. Shelley and Byron, for all the privileges of their birth, become critical exiles. And Keats? Keats is the great exception, according to received wisdom. He collapses onto a sickbed while his contemporaries leap to the barricades. He listens to the song of the nightingale while they catch the chant of the mob. He celebrates the alternative power of the imagination, while they describe the shadows of dark satanic mills.This view of Keats seriously distorts the reality of his work, but it has been nurtured for almost the whole of his posthumous existence.When he died at the tragically early age of 25, his admirers praised him for thinking "on his pulses" – for having developed a style which was more heavily loaded with sensualities, more gorgeous in its effects, more voluptuously alive to actualities than any poet who had come before him. They had good reason to do so. The language of all his poems, and in particular the great odes and narrative poems of his final (1820) volume, have a delicious velvety weight: they "load every rift with ore", to use one of his own phrases.Initially, there was only a very small audience for such things: it has been estimated that at the time of Keats' death, the combined sales of the three books published during his lifetime amounted to 200 copies. By the middle of the 19th century, greatly helped by the example of Tennyson, as well as the advocacy of his friends Arthur Hallam (the subject of In Memoriam) and Richard Monckton Milnes (author of the first biography of Keats, which appeared in 1848), things had changed. Keats was where he had wanted to be – and where, on his deathbed, he had despaired of being: "among the English poets". His canonical position has become increasingly secure with time.Buttressed by the irresistible pathos of his life story (family tragedies, poverty, doomed love, lingering illness and early death), he has turned into the poet that many readers regard as a kind of epitome: a suffering genius who tells the truth about human experience by removing himself from the ordinary stream of experience.This picture of Keats contains some important truths. His life does indeed describe a heroic attempt to accommodate and understand hardship, and his poetry is indeed crammed with exceptionally rich evocations and descriptions. But these things, and many other qualities associated with them, are part of a response to the wider world that has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves. In order to appreciate this, it is helpful to look at the context in which his poems were written.Keats was born in Moorgate in 1795, towards what was then the eastern edge of London, and spent all his life "on the margins". Following the early death of his parents (he was raised by his grandmother) he attended a school in Enfield that was to all intents and purposes a dissenting academy – somewhere providing a broad liberal education and encouraging liberal thinking.Once he had left school he trained as a doctor in Guy's hospital, absorbing the radical influences that were then sweeping through the medical establishment. New kinds of intervention and new standards of patient care, were aligned with his larger social sympathies.Almost exactly as Keats qualified, he gave up medicine. Once again, it was a change of course which allowed him to stay true to himself. Actually, to find himself. He took with him into poetry the fundamental principles that his education as a whole had rooted in him. He became friends with Leigh Hunt, editor of The Examiner, the great free-thinking journal of the day. He consorted with Hunt's circle, which included Shelley. He began writing poems which gave a voice to the convictions that justify his description of himself as a "rebel angel".In some of Keats' early work, these political allegiances are clear: the opening sections of the four books of his long poem Endymion, for instance, or squibs like the lines written on The Anniversary of the Restoration of Charles II. But by the time Keats reached his maturity – the ascent is astonishingly rapid and steep – he had absorbed the lessons of Shakespeare and found a way of writing that was simultaneously of its own particular time, and universal in its reach and application. It resists explicit mention of local circumstances (the government's suspension of habeas corpus, for instance, or the Peterloo massacre which occurred only days before he wrote the ode To Autumn) only because it seeks to reveal the general truth in a particular situation. This means that when we read his best poems – which with a few exceptions are those in the 1820 volume – we are watching a writer grapple with the largest eternal questions: what is the role of the imagination? What is the value of art? What is the purpose of suffering? How can we create our own selves, and integrate with the lives of others?At the same time as he was producing these great poems, Keats was also writing letters to friends and loved ones that clarify the theoretical thinking that lay behind them. They cover an extraordinary amount of ground, and show an equally extraordinary amount of wisdom, but they converge on a few central convictions. One of these is the idea that large theoretical concerns will only be comprehensible to people if they are rehearsed in very physical language. "Axioms in philosophy" he says, using an image that refers back to his medical days, "are not axioms unless they are proved upon our pulses". This is where the sensuality of his writing is so important. It is not merely a form of delighted and delightful engagement with things-in-themselves, but a way of thinking. His "life of sensation" is also a "life of thoughts".It is a notion that every poet writing after Keats has had to negotiate, and that most have shared. From the very small base of his early readership, he has become one of the most influential poets, as well as one of the most beloved.John KeatsPoetryAndrew Motionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |