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| Siblin scores at QWF after missing GG award The same day he was passed over for a Governor General's award, Eric Siblin won two Quebec Writers' Federation prizes for his non-fiction Bach book, The Cello Suites. cbc.ca |
This Cartooned Isle As this book reveals, the great theme of the British humor magazine Punch was Englishness itself. feeds.nytimes.com |
A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors | Book review Encompassing the belligerent, the banal and the plain brilliant, this deftly edited collection of essays shines, says Adam Mars-JonesA New Literary History of America is described in its cover copy as "America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming altogether different, plural, singular, new," but luckily the contents don't bear out this frighteningly wholesome agenda. The publishers might legitimately have borrowed Alasdair Gray's teasing warning to parents and teachers in his Book of Prefaces – "Do not let smart children handle this book. It will help them pass examinations without reading anything else," – except that their target readership is above school age, and it's hard to imagine anyone right up to full professor failing to get excitement from this charged grid of event and interpretation.Greil Marcus is the better known of the two editors, for his rich and wilful explorations of high and low culture. It's not surprising that a book with him as one of its devisers should contain articles about Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Hank Williams and Irving Berlin (the last two particularly good), Chaplin, Griffith, Preston Sturges, Citizen Kane, Some Like It Hot and Psycho (the last two, again, being little classics). More unexpected but equally successful is the inclusion in a literary history of essays on technology (the Winchester rifle, the linotype machine) and institutions such as Pentecostalism, the Book of the Month Club and Alcoholics Anonymous.The other editor, Werner Sollors, has written books called Neither Black Nor White Yet Both and Ethnic Modernism. I'm not suggesting that his contribution is entirely concerned with ethnicity, but the book is a striking anthology of racial attitudes, from Thi Phuong-Lan Bui's subtle meditation on the Vietnamese landscape as seen by its inhabitants and the invading forces, to Rob Wilson's rather feeble plea ("we need to hear these Pacific voices") on behalf of the native culture squashed by the annexation of Hawaii in the 1890s.Black anger old-style is expressed by Ishmael Reed in a rant only loosely based on Huckleberry Finn: "Twain exposes... this exotic yearning of those who despise blacks yet wish to imitate them. Who wish to be called 'honey' by them. Who wish to be 'petted' by them. Who wish to burn them, cut out their very entrails, and take them home with them. If you can't give us our nigger, they seem to say, we'll make do with Elvis." It's doubtful if this is as effective a challenge to received ideas as Leslie Fiedler's long-ago suggestion (in "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey", an essay published in 1948) that the racial dynamics of classic American literature include a strong element of same-sex longing.Certainly belligerence is preferable to the banality of artist Kara Walker's celebration of the election of Obama, in words ("WTF? No, not 'World Trade Federation', nor 'White Tyranny Forever', nor 'Who's That Fellow?' BUT 'What the Fuck?'") and images based on paper cut-outs, representing dancers, Civil War soldiers and bodies dangling from trees. Some of the shapes have been folded over before cutting so as to look like table decorations. Slogans, silhouettes and doilies – not much of a cultural response to a social and political breakthrough, but at least it hasn't dated in the year since the election, thanks to not saying anything that could be disproved.There's a lot of mediocre writing on offer here. Academics don't always have the knack of making their specialities infectious. Describing neglected Depression-era writers from racial minorities, Yael Schacher writes, "In the post-World War I period, varieties of estrangement distinguish colonial and assimilated ethnic characters." Doesn't exactly set you dashing off to the dustiest shelves in the library, does it? And here is Avital Ronell going into such Freudian rhapsodies over the telephone it hardly seems an invention at all, rather a manifestation of Alexander Graham Bell's psychopathology: "There is an opening, a wound for holding the other, for giving voice to the other's suffering and keeping close a fugitive alterity." Much more illuminating is Merritt Roe Smith on the Winchester rifle, making the sly political point of how strongly the American state has always supported private enterprise, when the product has military applications, and tracing the rapid diffusion into private firms of "armory methods" of mass production, long before the assembly line.The essayists who do the most disservice to their writer heroes are those who merely pat them into place in their niche in the canon, declaring for instance that Toni Morrison along with Alice Walker and Maya Angelou "remade the American literary landscape" with "language that was often itself a wonder". It begins to seem that being welcomed into the canon is like being embalmed and slid into Lenin's tomb, for crowds to shuffle past with their heads bowed. There's a lot to be said for being out in the cold.Still, when individual contributions shine they lift the whole enterprise – I'm thinking of Michael Tolkin's disconcerting piece about Alcoholics Anonymous ("a religion that may yet save the world"), or Kathleen Moran admitting, in her piece on the San Francisco earthquake, that when the centenary of the event came round she looked out the earthquake-preparedness kit that had been buried in a cupboard for decades.Hats off, though, to the editors above all, for constructing a volume where each element reinforces every other, often by contradicting it, so that the whole vast book is more exciting than even its most impressive part.Adam Mars-Jonesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Strangest Man: The Life of Paul Dirac by Graham Farmelo | Book review Paul Dirac, the subject of this superb biography, was the youngest ever physics Nobel Laureate, the co-discoverer of quantum mechanics and the man who predicted the existence of antimatter. He believed the fundamental laws of the universe must be "beautiful". Yet he was scathing of philosophy, complaining that Wittgenstein, his Cambridge contemporary, "talked too much". When he received the Order of Merit from the Queen, an acquaintance asked him what she was like. "Very small," Dirac replied. Farmelo succeeds in making us share his curiosity not only about subatomic particles but about the equally mysterious energies involved in Dirac's own life.Science and natureguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor ColeridgeThe Frost performs its secret ministry,Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cryCame loud – and hark, again! loud as before.The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,Have left me to that solitude, which suitsAbstruser musings: save that at my sideMy cradled infant slumbers peacefully.'Tis calm indeed! so calm that it disturbsAnd vexes meditation with its strangeAnd extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,With all the numberless goings-on of life,Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flameLies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.Methinks, its motion in this hush of natureGives it dim sympathies with me who live,Making it a companionable form,Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling SpiritBy its own moods interprets, every whereEcho or mirror seeking of itself,And makes a toy of Thought.But O! how oft,How oft, at school, with most believing mind,Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oftWith unclosed lids, already had I dreamtOf my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rangFrom morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted meWith a wild pleasure, falling on mine earMost like articulate sounds of things to come!So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!And so I brooded all the following morn,Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eyeFixed with mock study on my swimming book:Save if the door half opened, and I snatchedA hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,Fill up the intersperséd vacanciesAnd momentary pauses of the thought!My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heartWith tender gladness, thus to look at thee,And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,And in far other scenes! For I was rearedIn the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breezeBy lakes and sandy shores, beneath the cragsOf ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,Which image in their bulk both lakes and shoresAnd mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hearThe lovely shapes and sounds intelligibleOf that eternal language, which thy GodUtters, who from eternity doth teachHimself in all, and all things in himself.Great universal Teacher! he shall mouldThy spirit, and by giving make it ask.Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,Whether the summer clothe the general earthWith greenness, or the redbreast sit and singBetwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branchOf mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatchSmokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fallHeard only in the trances of the blast,Or if the secret ministry of frostShall hang them up in silent icicles,Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.Samuel Taylor ColeridgePoetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |