| Postcards From the Edge: Tocqueville’s Letters Home Most of Alexis de Tocqueville’s letters home from America have never been published in English. But Frederick Brown has translated them for a volume due out next year. feeds.nytimes.com |
Never mind the bad sex award – where's the good sex in fiction? As someone who works hard to get it right in my own novels, I'm very aware of just how difficult it is to depict wellAs the bad sex in fiction award shortlist lined up yesterday, the authors and their publishers scrambled to declare they'd have been offended not to have made the cut. Perhaps they were forgetting: it's the quality of the writing, not the sex, that's being assessed – and writing about sex well is one of the hardest things to do. There's an assumption that it will involve writing the nuts and bolts, what goes where. Wrong. Try it. "His right hand slipped down her left thigh, as his left hand deftly undid the catch of her bra, and then he whispered in her ear … " – which one? Where's this guy standing? Or is he sitting? Perhaps lying? And what's she doing with her hands, right and left? Writing about sex can be like a complicated game of Twister. You sit in front of your laptop, trying to work out where everything's going. It's worse than following the instructions for assembling flatpack furniture. Maybe there are some people who are turned on by DIY manuals, but for most of us they have the opposite effect. There are better ways for the writer to seduce the reader.Clothes are tricky. They don't magically dissolve but have to be removed, hopefully as part of mutual seduction. When Erica Jong invented "the zipless fuck" in Fear of Flying, who's to say she wasn't just a desperate author stuck with the practical details of getting socks shed, buckles undone and knickers off? Too much detail here and it's back to those flatpack manuals again. No wonder bodices get ripped – so much easier than fiddling around with the laces.Another problem is that what turns one person on is sure to be a turn off for someone else. For every reader who finds an action sexy, another is going "Yuck, he did what?" I loved the sex scene in Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong, but I have several friends who thought it provided way too much information. There can also be national variations. True to stereotyping, I've been asked to add sex by my Dutch editor, and to clean it up by my American editor. The solution to these problems is for the writer not to be too specific about what the characters are doing, but very specific about their reactions. The reader has to use their imagination, make their own connections, project their own private fantasies onto the characters. "Are they doing what I think they are?" Whatever it is, yup. I've been staggered by some of the deductions people have made about my sex scenes, but I'm quite happy to take the credit so long as they liked it.Then there's foreplay. Just like real sex, written sex needs a long build-up, from increased physical awareness to flirting to the first tentative touches and beyond. Tiny details are more important than larger actions; the fall of a shadow on the hollow at the base of the throat, the softness of skin on the inside of the wrist, the curve of a mouth. And, perhaps reflecting real life, men aren't as into foreplay. It takes an average of three minutes for a man to go from start to finish, 13 minutes for a woman. Perhaps that's why most of the shortlist for the bad sex awards are male. That's not to say they don't try with the best of intentions. Think Alan Titchmarsh, an earlier contender for the Literary Review's very dubious honour: "She planted moist, hot kisses all over his body. Beads of sweat began to appear on Guy's forehead as he became more entangled in the lissom limbs of this human boa constrictor." Boa constrictor? Oh dear.But at least Titchmarsh is trying to deal with one of the big problems with writing about sex. Most of the words usually associated with sex scenes don't work, especially body parts. For example, there isn't a single word for a penis that doesn't sound daft. Dick, cock, willie, member etc. They make me giggle, and while laughter is great in sex, it shouldn't be the sniggering sort. Who hasn't giggled over the rude bits in Lady Chatterley's Lover when they were at school? It's simply not sexy. Female genitalia are even worse. The earthy, Anglo-Saxon words work in context but I think their use should be limited or they lose impact. In my writing I don't name any body parts. It's not because I'm embarrassed – I'd only be embarrassed by using a phrase like front bottom – I just think the words jar. I try to be explicit, but without using an explicit vocabulary.So what's left? Well, how about emotions, physical sensations and images. In the middle of sex I'm not thinking, ooh he's just thrust his throbbing organ against my front bottom, so why should a character? Instead of writing about actions, I concentrate on the responses, how it feels both mentally and physically. Get into the head of the character and you can create the illusion that yes, this is real, this is happening to you the reader.I write mainly for women readers, and speaking for my sex I think we like being seduced. We don't want bedroom antics shoved in our faces, literally or metaphorically. We like a little delicacy, a little subtlety. As AnaĂŻs Nin wrote in Delta of Venus: "Without feelings, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine." Maybe it's me, but I find that image, and the concentration on physical sensation, a whole lot sexier than any amount of thrusting, grabbing or grinding. I'm not aiming to produce one-handed reads, but I do hope readers identify with my characters and get turned on when they do, and that means writing about how characters feel and think – about sex, about everything.Bad sex awardFictionSarah Duncanguardian.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: Baseball A trove of artifacts and photographs from The Library of Congress, home to the world’s largest baseball collection. feeds.nytimes.com |
Hearing a poet read their own work is endlessly entertaining | Sam Leith What felt like an early Christmas present arrived in the post this week: the new double CD of classic RSC performances. It's the sequel to The Essential Shakespeare Live, and it's called The Essential Shakespeare Live – Encore. I suspect they wanted to call it Now That's What I Call Shakespeare, but bottled out. Does the RSC do encores anyway? I can't quite see the company trooping off, waiting until the crowd's stamping reaches a climax, then bounding back on to belt out one more touching soliloquy and a quick Hey Nonny Nonny.But let that be. It's an attempt, in the form of bite-sized audio recordings from productions over the last 50 years, to popularise one of our most under-appreciated cultural resources: the British Library's Sound Archive. The first volume's star turn was a snatch of Paul Scofield's Lear – meaning I finally got to hear the performance that, a decade before I was born, could cause my granny to dissolve into tears just remembering it. Ian McKellen is in wracked form as Lear in the new volume, which also boasts Paul Robeson's strong-timbred Othello and David Tennant's daisy-fresh Hamlet, five decades apart.Of course, it's not like seeing a play. You get a fragment from a performance, complete with stage and crowd noises, but still it's fascinating to listen to. You can hear the changes, across the decades, in how actors read their lines (more freely these days), and in how the audience reacts (more vocal now). You also get a sense of the glorious plasticity of Shakespeare's material, how much it can change in different hands.Anyway, if nothing else, it's a great way into the magical world of the Sound Archive, in many ways the British Library's embassy to the world – even more so since it went online (sounds.bl.uk). There are some real gems in there. One of the earliest recordings (quite well known, this – I believe the poet James Fenton does it as a party piece) is of Robert Browning reading How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix in his funny, pinched Victorian voice. He cocks it up and, over the crackling of the wax cylinder, exclaims: "I can't remember mi own vahses!" You can also hear, in his thick Lincolnshire accent, Tennyson reading The Charge of the Light Brigade.Poets reading their own poems can have a powerful impact on how you react to and even understand their work. Would our feelings about Dylan Thomas's poetry be the same if we didn't have recordings of him reading it? The sonorities of Fern Hill or A Refusal To Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London are all the richer when spoken by him in his stewed Welsh way.The BL's Sound Archive isn't the only place you can hear such wonders. There's the brilliant US company Caedmon, which has been making recordings of poets for decades; and the online repository at The Poetry Archive – an admirable project by Andrew Motion, less than a decade old, that seeks to build up a systematic archive of contemporary poets reading their work.Being able to hear the voice of a major poet is endlessly entertaining: Ezra Pound chants, Wallace Stevens flutes, WB Yeats sing-songs, while Robert Lowell sounds, appropriately, exhausted. Sylvia Plath's voice – with its numbed precision – is simply really, really scary. Frieda Hughes, her daughter, sounds enough like her that I once nearly dived under the table when she took the mic at an awards ceremony.Poetry performed is a wholly different thing to poetry on the page; and poetry caught in a recording is a subtly different thing again – in that it is reproducible. And that, oddly, feeds back to the experience of reading it on the page.Once you have heard Alec Guinness performing The Waste Land a couple of times, the opening line ("April is the cruellest month ...") will always come to you in his voice. Conversely, this makes watching Star Wars on Christmas afternoon feel that bit more highbrow. And, for my money, Guinness reads Eliot much better than Eliot reads Eliot – getting across the sense in which, for some of us, the poem comes adrift from its author.I'm trying to reclaim The Waste Land from Guinness by listening to publishing company Savoy's rival recording; it's by PJ Proby (yes, the very same trouser-splitting rock abomination). Proby sounds pissed out of his mind, which I believe he was. This only adds to the recording's status as a majestic ruin.That Browning recording was once near-impossible to get hold of. Now, like so many of the glories of the world's cultural past, it's just a few clicks away. Encore, indeed.PoetrySylvia PlathTheatreSam Leithguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
British Library in Colindale: the final chapter The north London newspaper archive for the British Library is being digitised, and the millions of newspaper pages moved to Boston Spa in YorkshireKatie AllenEvery year, tens of thousands of novelists, historians, journalism students or people curious about their family tree make the pilgrimage to one of the oldest and largest newspaper archives in the world. The British Library's newspaper collection has been housed in the industrial north London area of Colindale since the 1930s and contains such treasures as papers announcing the outbreak of the second world war, early editions of the Beano, every 20th-century football programme and the first edition of the Manchester Guardian in 1821.State of the art storageBut the days of researchers making the trip up the more deserted reaches of the Northern line are numbered. The government has pledged ÂŁ33m to help create a state of the art storage facility in Yorkshire, a final resting place for millions of pages where it is hoped optimal humidity, temperature and oxygen levels will prolong their lives. By the end of 2012 the old newspaper library will be closed down, making way for social housing. The papers will be stashed away in Boston Spa, most of the public's research done with copies or the more sustainable formats of microfilm and digital files. The ultimate goal is a multimedia newspaper room."We've got a reading room identified at St Pancras for newspapers where you will be able to look at digital forms of newspapers, alongside other media such as audio and video as well," says Phil Spence, the British Library's director of scholarship and collections."When you come into this building it looks like time has stood still and that's the problem for the newspapers. Time hasn't stood still. If it could the newspapers would be in fantastic condition and they would be available to be used," he says.Collecting every local, regional and national UK newspaper has been a heavy burden for the British Library. The archive stacks are full to bursting and the structure around them increasingly dilapidated. Newspapers may contain many tales of their own demise but the sackloads of titles arriving through the doors at Colindale tell a different story. An explosion in the number of free newspapers and a rise in supplements mean there has been anything but a let-up in the millions of pages squeezed on to already creaking shelves.Maintaining a product essentially designed to be read once and then thrown away is a tall order – regulars to the archive talk about the "Colindale dandruff" that clings to their clothes after they have handled the delicate pages. Already 15% of the newspaper collection is so fragile it is beyond use. A further chunk is "in peril", soon to be withdrawn."The British Library is hugely relieved that it, along with the help of the newspaper industry, managed to convince the government of the archive's economic value," says Spence. "It's the history of the nation. Without it, we would have a big black hole in our nation's memory. And this is the last chance to do anything about it because this building will be full in 2012. The new building has growth planned in for 25 years."The library's commitment to the national memory includes digitising millions of 19th-century pages to make them searchable and available online. More pages are lined up for the same transformation and those too brittle to touch are stored away waiting for technological developments that could bring them back to life, perhaps with the help of MRI scans, suggests Spence.Early wallchartsEd King, head of the newspaper library, excitedly unveils the first Manchester Guardian from Saturday, 5 May 1821. Just a few pages long, it is crammed with adverts, including one on the front page for a room to let. There is also a fold-out detailed sketch of the 1851 Great Exhibition published with the Illustrated London News – a precursor to wallcharts. Among other milestones is the surge in titles in the 1860s to coincide with rising literacy and again in the 1890s with the emergence of the Daily Mail, a paper that sold 300,000 copies on its first day.But it is not all success stories. Walking through the stacks, King points to a large tome: "For every one of these that was successful, there were 10 failures. The majority of newspapers were short-lived."Created 10 years ago, a secure area known as the "Pen" houses Colindale's most valuable treasures. There are comics including the Beano and Dandy as well as football programmes, which all come under legal deposit – the legal requirement that a copy of every published item has to be sent to the British Library free of charge.All provincial newspapers from before 1830 are in the Pen too. King pulls out copies of the Caledonian Mercury, a newspaper with just one column on small pages, printed in Edinburgh in the 1720s, "when newspapers were read aloud and made available in coffee houses".By the 1750s three columns are more common, and in the 1780s newspapers grow larger and already look more akin to newspapers as we know them today.But as newspapers increasingly move online, those constants no longer seem so assured. Where does that leave the national newspaper archive?"My vision for this is it will be a different kind of archive," says King. "A binary archive. There will continue to be print and hard copies but increasingly the digital format will predominate. Over 10 years we have lived through a revolution."Shelfmarks• 750m newspaper pages in the archive covering 300 years of national and local news• 50km of shelf space• 56,000 separate print titles from across Britain and its former colonies• 400,000 reels of microfilm• 13,000 individual issues - newspapers, football match programmes, comics, magazines and other periodicals - received every month• The collection is growing at a rate of 800m of linear shelf space a year - equivalent to 7m newspaper pages• Used by around 30,000 individuals a year, from authors researching novels to people uncovering their family tree• Around 15% of the collection is in critical condition and cannot be viewed• A further 19% is at risk• 2m pages of 19th-century British newspapers have been digitised and made available online, a further 1m are to be added this year• It costs around ÂŁ1 a page to digitise the newspapersKANewspapers & magazinesNational newspapersBritish LibraryDaily MailThe GuardianDigital mediaKatie Allenguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |