| 'The Humbling': Philip Roth at his rawest Philip Roth remains prolific, unlike the main character in Roth's 30th. novel, a famous actor who has suddenly and inexplicably ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Velvet Underground members to reunite in New York Three members of the pioneering band are to share a stage for the first time in more than a decade, discussing their 'music and legacy' at the New York Public LibraryThree members of the Velvet Underground are to reunite next month – for a chat. Lou Reed, drummer Maureen "Moe" Tucker and bassist Doug Yule will share a stage for the first time in more than a decade, at an event organised by the New York Public Library.Though John Cale is conspicuously absent from the event, the three Velvets are to discuss their old band's "music and legacy" with David Fricke, a senior editor at Rolling Stone magazine. Fricke, who wrote the liner notes for the Velvet Underground's 1995 box set, once credited the group with "inventing modern rock".However, the Velvet Underground made their best workfrom 1965 to 1970, and Yule wasn't a member until the departure of Cale in 1968. When the band reunited in the mid-90s, playing Glastonbury and touring with U2, Yule was not invited. Sterling Morrison, the group's original guitarist, died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1995.Rather than promoting a Velvet Underground Rock Band videogame (with an electric viola controller perhaps?), the three members are promoting The Velvet Underground: New York Art, a coffee-table book featuring previoulsy unseen photographs, press clippings, flyers, posters, copies of Reed's handwritten lyrics, and designs by Andy Warhol. Published by Rizzoli, the book also includes a transcript of a conversation between Reed and Tucker – and a contribution by former Czech president (and Velvets fan) Václav Havel.The panel discussion is to be held at the Stephen A Schwarzman library on 8 December. Tickets are on sale now.Velvet UndergroundPop and rockSean Michaelsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Holiday Books: Photography More than 200 arresting photographs convey the complexity and scope of African-American beauty. feeds.nytimes.com |
Poem of the week: The Autumn Outings by Maurice Rutherford References to Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings infuse this week's poem, a quietly angry look at unemployment and managerial greed by a poet who deserves to be far better knownThis week's poem, "The Autumn Outings", is by the Hull-born poet Maurice Rutherford, and comes from his 1994 collection Love is a Four-Letter World, published by the (sadly) no longer trading Peterloo Poets. Rutherford's work is attractively down to earth in tone, soft-spoken in a dry, faintly melancholy English way. His themes, whether historical or personal, are handled with warmth and common sense, and an easily overlooked formal fluency. A political edge is often present, though not usually as plainly declared as in his 1992 tour de force, "The Autumn Outings".A near-contemporary of Philip Larkin, Rutherford sometimes uses Larkinesque forms or turns of phrase for his own poetic purposes. He usually does so in a good-humoured, non-parodic way, as if he simply found that Larkin liberated his own ideas. "The Autumn Outings" is perhaps a step closer to satire, being a poem about the joyless catastrophe of unemployment composed in the expansive, optimistic stanza of "The Whitsun Weddings".In Larkin's poem, you'll remember, a detached narrator describes almost novelistically the train-travelling wedding parties: he makes them comic, even a shade rustic, yet allows them to inhabit a landscape which, however mundane, is lit with a vague sense of possibility. The poem culminates in that famous, mysterious epiphany: "And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled/ A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/ Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain."The journey in "The Autumn Outings" is a lonely, silent, often-repeated one. The narrator, whose own company has gone bust, begins by remembering how he drove away from the closed down plant in pouring rain. The large stanza is utilised not only for a discursive narrative but for impassioned complaint. This is an angry poem, quietly but pointedly bitter about managerial greed and exploitation, and it remains a stringent comment on the grubby and grabby little year of 2009.For all the references to "The Whitsun Weddings", it has more serious aims than parody. The references are partly structural, and pathos rather than comedy emerges from the grammatical parallels. But the most important hinge between the two poems is the notion of "wedding", which Rutherford plays with to considerable effect. His poem certainly does not deny the wedding couples of Larkin's epithalamium their right to fun and happiness, but it exposes a different, darker dimension of working-class life. The harsh reality is that a man must be "wedded" to his work – until, of course, his work decides to divorce him.The speaker, unlike Larkin's narrator, is very much part of his community. He has been a good boss, as the second stanza reveals, and, even in extremis, he thinks compassionately of his employees. Time moves on with the poem, and the fifth stanza unfurls a complaint against Heseltine's infamous pit closures in the early 1990s.It turns out that the speaker has remained jobless for years. Now he muses on the general effects of unemployment, including the deterioration of his own high principles in favour of "quick back-pocket jobs". The "fat cats" are the most culpable, but they are not the only fallible people in this poem."The Autumn Outings" rises to a trenchant climax. As at the beginning of the poem, the rhyme sounds insist we hear a commentary on Larkin. The transcendental conclusion of his poem helps underline the stingingly political implications of Rutherford's, in which he imagines "the spores of loss, somewhere becoming gain".Rutherford is a master craftsman. His work should be far better known, but it belongs to a seam of English poetry which recent critics have neglected to mine – post-Movement, perhaps, rather than post-modern, working class but not wearing its class on its sleeve in the more showy "them and uz" manner of Tony Harrison. Let's hope some enterprising publisher decides to reissue all his collections soon.The Autumn Outings by Maurice RutherfordThat autumn I was quick getting away: only aboutone-twenty on the rain-drenched WednesdayI locked the premises and motored out,all staff sent home, all workshop plant closed down,all sense of any kind of business gone,and not until I'd driven fifteen milesalong fast-flooding roads back into town,past rival complexes just clinging on,did rain let up and vision clear: those filesI'd never see again; that desk, the phone that shrilled all daywhen first it was installed; not hear the moancompressors made, be soothed by lathes, nor say'Good morning George, alright?', or 'Nice one, Bert',the human touch, no more, not to distractthem too long from their work, but just enoughto let them see I cared, and not to hurtold feelings as I tried to breast the factof cancelled orders, creditors turned rough.The friendly bank soon bared its teeth – drew blood; and then that bane,the Tax Man, claimed his pound. And so, the flood.(fine detail dims again as, too, the painrecedes three autumns on; yet loss stays true.)The rain comes vicious now – wipers full speed,dipped headlights on, rear fogs – the journey seemsto lengthen every time I live it through,involuntarily, as when the needfor sleep is scuppered by recurring dreams. My crowd was breast-fed clichés, meal on meal: to pull its weight,nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel,and, once it stepped inside the factory gate,was wedded to its work; slapped all the timeby Newbolt's hand: Play up, and play the game.Well, this sounds fine; but what about the blokewho's anorexic, short-nosed, cannot climbto reach the wheel, and never makes the team?For him such wedding tales are guffs of smoke.Again the morning paper hits the floor – banner headlinedPIT CLOSURES SHOCK – and umpteen thousand moreare facing broken marriages to mines.A few, lured by that bit-of-fresh, fool's gold,pin hopes on boarding-houses, market-stalls;one man sits out his protest down the pit,while lefties call for strikes with all the oldclenched-fist salutes, and aerosol the walls:SCARGILL FOR KING and TARZAN IS A SHIT.Their first few days of idleness will see in those it hitsundreamed-of traits in personality:some will get by and others go to bits;the strong become the weak, the weak make goodas quickly as it's said. Then, as the daysstack up to months or, as in my case, years,high principles get trampled in the mudwhere guile and self-survival point new waysto quick back-pocket jobs, fiddles and fearsof being caught. But fears will yield, in time, a sort of pride,though not the social pride that saw men climbfrom old-world swamps: a sense that one's defiedthe odds, the system; finger-licked the crème,nose-thumbed some top brass, bested those who madethe rules and all the running. What survives?Of Us: too early yet to tell. Of Them:'Indifferents and Incapables'; their tradein UB40s and P45s.In brass-lined boardrooms up and down the land deep in regreta million more redundancies get planned,while chairmen's hiked-up salaries are set,and Urban Councils chase arrears in rents.Wide-boys, insider-dealers, some M.P.sgrow richer by a second home in Spain,a custom-plated white Mercedes Benz,that new portfolio. True-blue disease.The spores of loss, somewhere becoming gain.PoetryCarol Rumensguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The iTablet cometh Will Apple's iTablet lead media companies out of a wilderness of non-paying customers?For the video content makers nervously biting their fingernails over how soon filesharing of films and TV is going to wipe out their revenues, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week offered wonderful news – TV, like film, is going 3D. And you know what 3D means? Can't be filmed by a camcorder in a cinema and copied endlessly; can't just be grabbed from the set-top box and redistributed on torrent sites. Or if it is, it will look even worse than a fifth-generation VHS copy (remember those?).And then there was the AR Drone, a mini-helicopter that can be controlled by an iPhone, which is sure to be banging into walls in advertising agencies around London hours after it goes on sale; and an unbreakable mobile phone (you can hammer nails with it).But the hype, the noise, the lights … CES is peculiarly named because although it calls itself a "consumer electronics" show, its keynote opening speech comes from Microsoft – which has failed woefully year after year to come up with any consumer electronics people want to buy, apart from two- button mice and, OK, the Xbox (though it's lost pots and pots of money on it).This year it was Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, who signally failed to set the event, or the world, on fire. Meanwhile, all over the place computer companies were showing off their wares, which will make barely any difference to anyone's lives except those of their desperate makers. Will a laptop with a transparent screen (so you can be distracted by people walking behind it as well as reflections) really transform our experience of work or leisure?Instead, the susurrus behind CES was about tablet computers – large screen, no keyboard, touch interface. Although Ballmer referred to them in his speech, and a number of companies (including Lenovo and HP) showed them off, and the Que e-reader (from a British company) wowed some, the focus was not on them but on Apple – which never exhibits at CES. Until last year, Apple had its own show that conflicted directly, and its much-expected tablet is due this month. That expectation was all but confirmed by a story carefully leaked to the Wall Street Journal last Monday, detailing a possible price, and suggesting that "people briefed by Apple also say that the company believes it could redefine the way consumers interact with a variety of content".It's the latter phrase that has media companies – producers of books, newspapers, films, TV, music, and especially, for some reason, newspapers – gasping like parched travellers in a desert. They look at the success of the iPhone (which, before its announcement, had mobile phone makers laughing: Apple? A computer company? Make a phone?) and gasp: let the iTablet lead us out of this wilderness of non-paying customers!This ignores the question of how you'll have to redesign or repurpose your content to fit Apple's as yet unseen device (is it just a big iPhone? Is it also 3D?) – a question that has troubled Ben Hammersley of Wired UK, who points out on his blog (http://bit.ly/wiredUK) that present workflows for most magazines simply don't countenance the idea of a hyperlinked, perhaps video- and audio-enabled end product; they're trying to produce something for print. The iTablet (or whatever) will mess that up badly.So be careful what you wish for from CES. It has given you the DVD, which you've loved. It has given you Blu-ray, which has not quite taken over the world. It has given you high-definition TV, and now it's giving you 3D films and TV. But it never gave you the iPhone, and won't give you the iTablet. Shows are one thing. But the decisions that really change the game are made in the shops and homes.Even so, one of those iPhone helicopters would be nice. Just saying.Charles Arthur is the Guardian's technology editorNewspapers & magazinesConsumer Electronics Show (CES)NewspapersTelevision industryWall Street JournalAppleMicrosoftFile sharingiPhoneSteve BallmerMedia businessCharles Arthurguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |