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| Paperback Row Paperback books of particular interest. feeds.nytimes.com |
Linklog: In praise of Fowler, in print with Spender, and more HW Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage celebrated in a somewhat unexpected quarter (good comments thread, too).• Stephen Spender – dreadful printer, brilliant creator of collectible objects (in two parts).• Capital letters in the middle of words hasten the collapse of literate civilisation, apparently (and there's bonus material).• Petrona on what British bookselling might look like after Borders.Peter Robinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
John Lennon's lost six-hour interview Student's meeting with member of the Beatles in 1968 reveals furious response to claims the group had sold outIt took more than 40 years, but John Lennon has finally got in his furious response at having Revolution, one of his most famous songs with the Beatles, unfavourably compared to the BBC radio drama Mrs Dale's Diary.The jibe that the Beatles had sold out to the establishment was made in 1968 in a letter to Tariq Ali's radical journal Black Dwarf – which had concluded that the Beatles' mortal rivals, the Rolling Stones, had superior radical credentials.Now, an apparently forgotten interview reveals how Lennon felt about the criticism at the time. "It's no good knocking down a few old bloody Tories!" Lennon raged, at the end of a year when Europe had been convulsed by student, trade union and political demonstrations and strikes. "The system's a load of crap. But just smashing it up isn't gonna do it."Today's music fans will be stunned by the circumstances of the interview: Lennon spoke for six hours at his home in Surrey, sustained only by macrobiotic bread and jam made by Yoko Ono, to an overawed first-year student from Keele University who had hitchhiked hundreds of miles to meet him after applying by a letter sent to a fan magazine.A snippet was duly published in the Keele student magazine, but most of the material stayed in the files of Maurice Hindle, now an author completing a book on Lennon and an academic at the Open University – until today, when he finally publishes the full version in the New Statesman."Outside Weybridge station a Mini Cooper with smoked-glass windows skidded to a halt like something out of The Italian Job. In the driver's seat was Lennon, looking much as he does in the colour photograph included with the Beatles 1968 White Album faded blue Levi's jacket, white T-shirt and jeans, dirty white sneakers, his shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, and , wearing the now famous granny glasses."We students crammed into the back of the Mini and John drove us up the bumpy private road that led to his house, Kenwood. In a sitting room at the back of the house we sat down on thick-pile Indian carpets around a low table, cross-legged. Yoko said little, as we all knew this was primarily John's day – and he said a lot.Apart from a short break, when Yoko fed us macrobiotic bread and jam she had made, Lennon talked continuously for six hours."Lennon was enraged by the open letter by John Hoyland published in Black Dwarf. The Beatles might have changed their image, but had lost none of their fire, he insisted."OK so we mop-topped it to get where I am – I'm here," he said. "There have been millions of changes, of course, but I'm still doing exactly the same thing I was doing at school, or at art school, and as a Beatle. "I'm not going to get myself crucified if I can help it, and so I've compromised. But I just want to see someone who hasn't, and who's still alive.""I've always said that 'don't drop out man – just stay in and subvert it!'"Memories of the altercation were revived last year when most of the surviving protagonists were interviewed for various documentaries marking the anniversary of the 1968 protests and uprisings.John Lennon died on December 8 1980, shot on the doorstep of his Dakota building home in New York by Mark Chapman - but by then had long since made his peace with Tariq Ali, and regained his radical laurels.The American journal Counterpunch four years ago finally published in full a long 1971 interview by Ali and Robin Blackburn, originally for the Trotskyist Red Mole, in which Lennon agreed with Ali that he was becoming "increasingly radical and political".There was nothing new about this, Lennon insisted. "I've always been politically minded, you know, and against the status quo. It's pretty basic when you're brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere."John LennonThe BeatlesPop and rockNew StatesmanConsumer magazinesMagazinesNewspapers & magazinesMaev Kennedyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Book buzz: What's new in publishing and on the list After an impressive run by Sarah Palin's memoir, 'Going Rogue,' it looks as if 2010 will be a big year for books by other Republicans. ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor Christopher Tayler on a powerful novel of homelessness and addiction"They break down the door at the end of December and carry the body away." So begins Jon McGregor's third novel, which is set in an unidentified English city, perhaps in the East Midlands, and in more or less the present. It's a sturdy, declarative opening sentence, but as the next few paragraphs begin to set the scene – a social housing block backing on to frozen playing fields – the reader's footing starts to feel less firm. It turns out that the narrating voice belongs to a "we"; "we" huddle in a doorway and see people come and go. When two policemen turn up to search a flat, we follow them inside, apparently functioning here like a point-of-view notation in a film script. In the course of the discovery of a man's body, however, it's made clear that "we" are invisible presences of some kind. We also knew the dead man, Robert, and when his corpse is eventually packed into a van, we climb in after him.Robert's past is already coming into focus, thanks partly to "our" spectral visions in his flat, in which – script-like again – we see time spool back and then go into fast-forward. We see him and Yvonne, his partner, both much younger, doing the place up when they first moved in; we see them bathing an infant daughter a few years later, and Robert surreptitiously fetching a bottle of whisky from under the kitchen sink. Yvonne leaves with the daughter and Robert stays put, drinking and succumbing to dereliction. As years turn into decades, damaged people like us – drug addicts, alcoholics, vagrants – start using his flat to shoot up or spend the night in, propitiating him with booze or food. Some of us, or some people we knew, were the last people to see him before the authorities broke the door down. "What took them so long", we ask or accuse (no question marks). "Where were they."As Robert's remains head towards the mortuary, distinct characters start emerging from the ragged compound voice, and once the reader has settled into the novel's idiom, worries about the narrative perspective begin to fade. Perhaps it makes no difference if "we" are ghosts or hallucinations, living or dead: the kinds of people that McGregor is making speak are only very intermittently visible to inhabitants of the regular world either way. The book makes no such thumping points, however, and if anyone can be called ghostly in it, it's the regular population, whose presence in the city is barely registered by the characters.These characters, Robert's visitors, are both depressingly similar and strongly particularised. Danny, who finds Robert's body before the police do and runs off in a panic, is a heroin addict from London, bespectacled and somewhat inexperienced. As a result, he's frequently "taxed" (ie beaten up and robbed). His associate Mike, a Scouser and a heroin addict too, has better survival skills but is more obviously troubled, using heroin to tamp down a schizophrenia-type disorder. Heather (crack and heroin, ex-groupie) puts up a good pretence of being more together; Steve (alcohol, ex-army) always remembers to lay his socks out to dry before passing out. Also "on the scene", as Heather puts it, are a volatile kid called Ben, a Helmand veteran called Ant, and a young woman called Laura, who turns out to be Robert's now grown-up and smack-addicted daughter.In five long sections, each structured around a stage in the corpse's journey to the coroner and cremation, McGregor assembles a fragmentary group portrait of these figures. The reader is shown what happens when higher-grade heroin arrives in the city after a drug drought, and most of the circumstances that led to Robert's death. There are flashes of bitter humour, usually concerning the authorities (a crackdown by the council is attributed to "some cunt watching too much Taxi Driver and giving it all Some day a rain's going to come and wash all this scum off the streets but in the meantime a blanket ban and some asbos will have to do"). But in general the tone is unrelentingly grim, though not in a hectoring way: you're simply immersed in the protocols of homelessness and addiction. Eventually the book offers competing explanations for both the nature of the voices and Robert's end, bringing the curtain down with a light touch and no sense of copping out.On his website, McGregor – who's best known for his Booker-longlisted first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002) – names James Kelman and William Faulkner as the new book's literary models. With their help, he strikes a neat balance between depicting a semi-abstract landscape of suffering and grounding the characters' experiences firmly in history. His occasional use of the language of damnation and salvation doesn't tip over into would-be Beckett-like posturing, while the deep backgrounds to some of his character's problems – the Falklands war, Thatcher-era unemployment and, in one memorable passage, Afghanistan – are neither deployed as clinching revelations nor put on show as grand themes. McGregor also shows a fine ear for several varieties of regional speech, and exerts strict but not obsessive control over his initially formless-looking story. His reportorial absorption in the characters' world, with its restricted range of tone and incident, makes this powerful novel seem all the more resourcefully put together.FictionChristopher Taylerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |