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| Andrew Motion to chair Booker prize judges Newly free from his duties as poet laureate, the poet will lead deliberations to find 2010's best novelFormer poet laureate Andrew Motion will chair the judging panel for next year's Man Booker prize, following an eclectic roster of former chairs including Michael Portillo, PD James and Douglas Hurd.Philip Larkin, the subject of a prize-winning authorised biography by Motion, held the position in 1977, when he and his fellow judges selected Paul Scott's Staying On, the sequel to The Raj Quartet, as their eventual winner. Former chair of the Financial Services Authority Howard Davies, author Fay Weldon and poet Anthony Thwaite have also chaired the Booker judging panel in the past.Motion, who stepped down as laureate in May after a 10-year term, said the role was "an honour" and "an exciting challenge". "A lot of difficult decisions lie ahead," he added. "I greatly look forward to a year of reading voraciously."Last year's judges, chaired by broadcaster James Naughtie, read a total of 132 books, whittling this down to their eventual winner, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which has now sold more than 120,000 copies in the UK.Motion and his fellow judges, who have yet to be announced, will begin their reading in January. The Booker rules allow each publisher to enter two novels for the prize, in addition to previous winners and shortlisted authors from the previous five years. Editors are also allowed to recommend up to five other titles from their lists, with judges then able to "call in" those they wish to consider. They must call in a minimum of eight and a maximum of 12 additional novels.With Motion in the chair, 2010's judges will unveil their longlist of 12 or 13 titles next July. The shortlist will be revealed in September, and the winner announced on 12 October.Motion, who is co-founder of the online Poetry Archive, is currently professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway College. He was knighted for services to literature earlier this year.Booker prizeAndrew MotionFictionAwards and prizesAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
How Hollywood destroyed our classical legends It took a millennium for western civilisation to create a canon of classical literature – but just 10 years for Hollywood to destroy itWhen I think back on this decade's spate of movies based on the great legends of European history, I remember how fantastically it started – with Gladiator – and how badly things went downhill after that: with Kingdom of Heaven, Troy, 300 and Beowulf. When I saw Gladiator in 2000, I thought this was going to be just the best millennium ever. It had everything you could want in a movie: glory, gore, guts, gladiators. It was a sweeping epic with a computer-generated cast of thousands. Augustus Caesar would have been proud of it. Julius and Tiberius, too.Yet the thing I liked most about Ridley Scott's superb film was how closely it hewed to the historical record, in its portrayal of Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) as the depraved son of Marcus Aurelius, the zany old philosopher king himself. Commodus, history tells us, was in fact a vogueing headcase who liked to dress up as a gladiator, to no great effect. Gladiator was the kind of movie you could enjoy, even if it could have done without all that Enya keening, but it was also the kind of movie that made you feel good about western civilisation. Sure, we've had our share of rough times down through the centuries, and sure, we occasionally got suckered into playing ball with the occasional no-good mass murderer. But when push came to shove, when the flickering embers of liberty were about to be extinguished forever, we all knew that a hell-for-leather hero like Russell Crowe would arise out of nowhere and get western civilisation back on track. Because that's the way we do things around here.Sadly, as the decade limped along, films of this emotionally nutritious nature started to stray from these hallowed principles. Liberties were taken with our touchstone myths – The Iliad, Beowulf. The Crusades were belittled as the Franks were portrayed as avaricious scum in Kingdom of Heaven, and even the great Arthurian saga got turned on its head in the fashionably revisionist King Arthur. By the time the decade had run its course, moviegoers could be forgiven for writing off westerners of bygone times as charlatans, butchers, psychopaths and scumbags. The nadir was reached when Leonidas, whose 300 valiant Spartans had kept democracy from being crushed beneath the Persian boot at Thermopylae, got turned into a blustery show-off cavorting in his underpants in 300. No longer did we need Genghis Khan – portrayed in the film Mongol as the sweetest chap since the young George Harrison – or Attila the Hun to put western civilisation to the sword. Hollywood did it all by itself.To be fair, this was not a great decade for movies, period. Oh, sure, it was a pretty good decade for movies about slovenly males who could not get dates, or about adorable rodents, or about repressed individuals whose inner strengths could only be released through the power of dance. It was also a good decade for movies involving suspiciously eloquent British gangsters and Orcs. But it was not a great decade for romantic comedies, movies about the government or movies involving amazing scams. And it was certainly not a great decade for the kinds of movies that I love: gladiator movies. Other than Gladiator, of course.The past decade was a dark interregnum when directors cavalierly took the defining myths of the west and ripped them to pieces, often with help from screenwriters who had previously worked as bartenders. This was a heartbreaking development for those of us who grew up worshipping swords-and-scimitars cinema. Every time I saw the trailer for one of these films – Golly! Look at all those CG ships sailing off to burn the topless towers of Ilium!! – my heart would leap in a way it had not since word got out that Pixies might be reforming.This is puzzling because I am not even sure exactly what it is that all these films have in common, other than a passion for dismemberment. Troy is set eight centuries before Christ's birth; Kingdom of Heaven takes place almost 1,200 years after His death. Gladiator is dominated by pagans; Kingdom of Heaven by Christians; Troy and 300 by men who grudgingly defer to the suzerainty of Zeus; and Beowulf by unreconstructed devotees of Odin and Thor. Yet for some reason all these films seem to take place in the same historical era, and even in the same society. That is because there is no sophisticated technology of note – just about everything is done with swords and spears and axes, plus the occasional catapult – and because the films are filled with comely, bosomy wenches manhandled by oafs clutching flagons of mead, or some mead-like substance quaffed from flagons undulating like the thighs of Minerva. They are also films where men wear skirts. They are films where men will suffer excruciating deaths but the bards will sing of their glory forever, overlooking that business with the skirts. They are films where men will live for gold but die for glory. But mostly they are films where the hero's sidekick will be played by Brendan Gleeson.Searching for an all-encompassing term to describe this genre of rip-roaring motion picture, clinicians sometimes refer to them as Faux Quasi-Centurion Neo-Feudal Merovingian Ultra-Hyborean Men of Yore Action Flicks, where the story could transpire anytime between the era of Solomon and the rule of Saladin, and in which at some point one of the characters will say: "You do me great honour, my liege. But I'm still not going into that cave." Though I have always preferred the term Films That Go Beyond the Impale.As the decade wore on, Men of Yore films got more and more over the top and more and more dependent on special effects. This was partly because of an industry-wide belief that Ray Winstone's acting could be dramatically improved via computer enhancement. That supposition proved to be false, though it worked well enough with Gerard Butler in 300. An even greater problem was the habitual tinkering with the historical record. King Arthur may be perfectly on target in suggesting that Lancelot was not a native of the British Isles. But if Lancelot first drew breath in the steppes of central Asia, why would you get an actor named Ioan Gruffudd to play him? If Lancelot did hail from Sarmatia – first left past Parthia - wouldn't it have made more sense to get someone specifically "ethnic" to play the role? Someone like Javier Bardem or Antonio Banderas or Sacha Baron Cohen? Well?The films that clambered down the path once trod by Gladiator had mixed results at the box office. Most of them fared poorly in the US, but made up for it overseas. However 300, with no stars to speak of and not much money spent on wardrobe, was a jaw-dropping, breakout hit. This may have been, as the Iranian government seemed to be theorising, because the film is a thinly veiled critique of present-day Iran's nuclear ambitions, with Iran's current president as the modern reincarnation of the rapacious Xerxes the Great, and Leonidas's 300 Spartans serving as thinly veiled precursors of US special forces. In fact, that's as logical an explanation for the appeal of the movie as suggesting that it took hundreds of millions of dollars just because the public liked to see Gerard Butler prancing about in his skivvies.Rest assured, I am not asserting that all of these films were complete artistic failures, that there was nothing in them that was worthy of note. I thoroughly enjoyed John Malkovich's impish Norse/Santa Monica/Mull of Kintyre burr in Beowulf, where he played the skulking coward Unferth, son of Elfirth, sworn kinsman of Hrothgar the Miscast (Anthony Hopkins). I also liked the part where Grendel's unhinged mother sings a lullaby to her mortally wounded offspring that sounds like a Scandinavian version of The Star-Spangled Banner. Grendel's mom, who's got it going on, is played by a buck-naked Angelina Jolie, clad only in spiked heels and a delicate patina of spray-painted gold trim. (Jolie cornered the market in legendary moms who've got it going on – she was also Olympias, creepy mother of the strangely blond Colin Farrell, in Alexander.) In Beowulf, Jolie also sports a smoky accent that suggests she may have relocated to the Lair of the White Worm from suburban Moscow. It's as if somebody deliberately set out to make a sixth-century Viking-American synthesis of Goldfinger and From Russia With Love. And not a moment too soon, say I, by the loins of Wotan! I said these movies were stupid. I didn't say they weren't fun.I am also not trying to suggest that there is anything wrong with future generations tampering with the myths that have trickled down through the sands of time in an attempt to make them more relevant to contemporary audiences. This only becomes a problem when the iconoclasts or revisionists of the present completely lose sight of what made these ancient myths so beloved by denizens of the past. The story of the siege of Troy makes no sense if there are no gods involved in the mayhem and if Menelaus and Agammemnon end up dead. The whole point of The Iliad is that mortals are the helpless playthings of the gods and that stupid old men always start wars, but get impressionable young men to die in them. Just as stupid old men finance bad movies but get gullible young computer-generated men to act in them. Beowulf is completely without meaning if Beowulf himself willingly fathers a monster. The reason people clamour for a hero who will become an icon and then become a legend and then quite possibly go back to being an icon – since the hours are better – is because they are looking for someone they can be reasonably sure will never, ever go to bed with the mother of a deformed monster he has just finished cutting to pieces. Even if she does look like Angelina Jolie.The past 10 years were typified by films set in a land beyond imagination where a people beyond redemption cried out for a warrior beyond belief who would inspire the myth that spawned the untold story, but instead ended up with Orlando Bloom. For whatever the reason, the yearning masses in these films, marooned between the bowels of hell and the sword of the infidel, continually put their money on the wrong horse. Eric Bana (Hector) instead of Brad Pitt (Achilles). Ray Winstone (Beowulf) instead of Angelina Jolie (Grendel's pesky mommy). Orlando Bloom (a French blacksmith) instead of Liam Neeson (a French knight). I really and truly believe that if the imperilled Franks and Trojans and Saxons and Jutes in these movies had deposed their leader and replaced him with Brendan Gleeson, things would have turned out a whole lot better for everyone.Let's not forget that in the last frames of Braveheart, the previous decade's great Man of Yore film, the Scots who come roaring down the hill to massacre the English at Bannockburn are led not by Clive Owen, not by Orlando Bloom, not by Gerard Butler, not by Eric Bana, and certainly not by Ioan Gruffudd, but by none other than Brendan Gleeson. I am not being disingenuous when I say that if Brendan Gleeson had been alive when the Vandals and the Visigoths blew through town in the fifth century AD, the Roman Empire would still be around today. And if Ridley Scott had only had the foresight to include Brendan Gleeson in the cast of Gladiator in the first place, Russell Crowe's character would still be around for the sequel. A sequel, by the way, that I would very much look forward to seeing.ClassicsAction and adventurePeriod and historicalJoe Queenanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Anything for a fast festive buck... Jean Hannah Edelstein thumbs through this year's Christmas novelty titlesBooks sold as Christmas novelties are, for the most part, the Ferrero Rocher of literature: volumes conceived by their authors and publishers to be stacked high and priced low by the cash register at Waterstone's, to be snatched up by shoppers who have reached that phase of Yuletide buying that's driven by a feeling of obligation towards the recipient (your brother-in-law, say) rather than affection. These are presents for people who you do not especially like.Each Christmas, publishers unleash a fresh slew of novelty titles that strongly resemble the ones from the previous year. And each year some prove better than others, some become surprise bestsellers and quite a lot are browsed on the day itself – these are lists, compendiums and collections, not designed to be read like most books (don't miss the crucial entry on "Places to See Before They Disappear" in Schott's Almanac 2010 (Bloomsbury £16.99) – and then stashed on bathroom shelves to provide entertainment while we are otherwise engaged.Some authors are more at ease with this remit than others: in his introduction to Sod's Law (Atlantic £7.99), Sam Leith notes that the fact that he is writing lavatory books to pay his mortgage is a prime example of the fact that ''the invisible order of the universe really is conspiring to make your toast land butter side down'". The selection of further examples he catalogues describes everything from grand mal disasters to minor, everyday mishaps and may even provoke a smile in a cantankerous relative who finds joy in the misfortunes of others.Derek Wilson's contribution to the genre, Britain's Really Rottenest Years (Short Books £12.99), suggests that the war, poverty and swine flu of 2009 is positively bright when compared with other terrible times in our nation's history. Don't be misled by the promotion, however – for a Christmas novelty offering, this book is well-researched, with real heft. It may well prove to have more staying power than some in the new year, possibly even meriting a spot on a nightstand rather than in the loo.The orgy of schadenfreude continues in two near-identical volumes for people whose Christmases have already been wrecked by the credit crunch. You Total Banker!: Getting Even With the Bastards Who Started the Credit Crunch by Aled Lewis (New Holland £7.99) and 101 Uses for a Useless Banker by Alex Steuart Williams, Sarah Crowther and Nick Reid (JR Books £9.99) are collections of cartoons of men in pinstriped suits being mocked, tortured and humiliated. In both, the artwork is basic and charmless, the jokes neither witty nor clever. But under the circumstances, perhaps that's the point.As for those who dislike the season's over-consumption, try Mrs Scrooge (Picador £4.99). Here, Carol Ann Duffy reworks Dickens's tale of miserliness to suggest that thrift is, after all, a suitable way to celebrate the season, in light of the effect of excessive shopping on the environment. Duffy's language and Posy Simmonds's illustrations, infused with warmth but never sickly sweet, make this a choice that will warm the hearts of Christmas refuseniks of all ages.Michele Clarke and Taylor Plimpton have taken a less heartwarming approach to placating Christmas-loathers with The Dreaded Feast (Harry N Abrams £9.99), "a holiday anthology for people who aren't so crazy about the holidays". Mainly gathered from American newspapers and magazines, there are contributions here from an immodestly star-studded list of droll writers, from Calvin Trillin on fruitcake to a classic David Sedaris short story about a family's dogged quest to defeat their neighbours through trumping all other demonstrations of holiday excess. All very amusing, but do people who don't like Christmas want to receive a book about not liking Christmas? It seems slightly questionable logic.But it's not, perhaps, entirely unlike the logic subscribed to by Ariane Sherine, the journalist who originated the Atheist Bus Campaign. She has edited The Atheist's Guide to Christmas (The Friday Project Limited £12.99), which is a book about not believing in God for people who don't believe in God – designed to be palatable enough, as Sherine writes in the brief, cheerful introduction, "to leave around your granny". Here are essays, short stories and polemics from the usual atheist suspects (Richard Dawkins, Ben Goldacre, Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association), as well as a few surprises who come scampering out of the crowded closet of non-believers – who knew leading chick-lit novelist Jenny Colgan is also a committed atheist?Some of the writing is insightful, funny, inspiring, some of it feels a little phoned-in; what matters most is that this is a labour of love, with the royalties going to the Terrence Higgins Trust, which is reason enough to buy a copy for everyone on your shopping list – even the people you actually like.Jean Hannah Edelstein is the author of Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don't Get Why Men Don't Get Them (Preface £12.99)ChristmasJean Hannah Edelsteinguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Why are so many middle-aged women cursed by depression? | Margaret Drabble Novelist Marian Keyes is the latest celebrity to reveal she is depressed. But in speaking out about it, she is already moving onDepression is in the news these days. We love to read and write about it and yet, whenever we discuss it, we offer the same routine disclaimer. Sufferers from depression, we are told, are too ashamed or embarrassed to admit to their condition. They are reluctant to seek help, although we all piously agree there is nothing to be ashamed of in mental illness. And we keep on repeating this to ourselves, despite the glaring examples of distinguished depressives who have been far from reticent about their state. These include Alastair Campbell, Stephen Fry, Professor Lewis Wolpert and, most recently, the highly successful novelist Marian Keyes, whose outburst of near-despair last week has provoked a good deal of commentary, both sympathetic and snide. She says she can't eat, sleep, write, read or talk to people and that she doesn't know when she will ever emerge from this darkness. She has told the world about this on her website, so she won't mind my repeating it.So, is depression fashionable or is it unmentionable? Is it a taboo or a mark of distinction? Is a confession an act of exhibitionistic self-indulgence? It's not clear whether we think we run risks by ignoring it or whether we talk about it too much. It is obviously unwise for politicians to admit openly to depression, at least while they are in or seeking office, and dentists and doctors don't often own up to it, although many suffer from it. I was told by a reliable source that the suicide rate for dentists in the United States is higher than that in any other profession, yet most dentists appear to be quite jolly. It's all right for actors, performers, writers, artists and women to admit to weakness, because they aren't responsible and they don't count.Fashions in illness come and go. Appendixes, adenoids and tonsils are no longer as smart or as suspect as they were and it appears that the vogue for ulcers has given way to the label of acid reflux. There are fashions in mental health, too, and the recent proliferation of dramatic eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia begins to make depression look seriously old-fashioned. Feminist scholars Elaine Showalter and Lisa Appignanesi have written about the changing history of women's afflictions, noting that the 19th-century diagnosis of hysteria (etymologically, a womb-related disorder) more or less disappeared and was overtaken by a blanket diagnosis of depression. And it would appear, from such inevitably unreliable statistics as we have, that women are more liable to depression than men, despite the exceptions cited above. More women take anti-depressants and more women are succumbing to depression year by year, or so recent surveys suggest.In the old days, the days of my mother and grandmother, female depression was often linked to the menopause and took the form of low spirits, mood swings, a sense of worthlessness and redundancy and odd acts of eccentricity (kleptomania was often excused as menopausal). These states were very different from the florid hysteria from which some of Freud's patients suffered. Hormonal changes were blamed for what was seen as a not very welcome but inevitable rite of passage: you expected this kind of thing to happen to you at a certain age. The woman, no longer fertile and made uncomfortably aware of her diminishing biological attractions, sank into a period of gloom from which she would emerge when the hormones settled and she meekly accepted her reduced role. The word "menopausal" was flung around as a routine insult, but I suspect that, like the words "cretin" and "spastic", it may be less acceptable now. Men didn't have to go through this middle-aged valley, because they remained potent and didn't have to confront bodily change so bleakly. They went under later, at retirement.Female expectations changed dramatically with the availability of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which delayed the menopause and some of its associated ills. My generation eagerly swallowed those little reddish brown pellets of mare's urine, or whatever they were made of, as though they were the elixir of life, just as we had swallowed the contraceptive pills that had given us our freedom. We didn't care about the long-term effects, we just wanted to stay young a bit longer. We didn't want to go down into the vale just yet. I remember having serious doubts about all of this when I met a 68-year-old woman at a charity luncheon, who confided to me over the soup that she was still menstruating and proud of it. I was taken aback. I think it occurred to me then, with justified foreboding, that the depression traditionally associated with the menopause might not have been avoided by HRT, it might just have been postponed, and that it would kick in later, with all the more force because the body and spirit would be older and weaker and future prospects less bright.The chronological curve of women's expectations has changed spectacularly during Marian Keyes's writing life. She is 46 years old, but nowadays a 46-year-old is not even seen as middle-aged. She is in the prime of life and is more likely to be accused of suffering from the hangover of celebrity and success than from the once-inevitable "change of life". I read one or two of her novels 10 years ago when I was writing an essay about chick lit and the courtship novel, inspired by the emergence of Bridget Jones. The heroines of chick lit are 10 years older than the heroines of Jane Austen, in their thirties rather than their early twenties. They are financially independent and enjoy unlimited freedom of speech and movement; Bridget Jones is noticeably more confident about sexual intercourse than she is about fancy cooking. This is a very different social world from Austen and even from early Drabble.Women's lives have in one generation changed almost out of recognition. Keyes's Sushi for Beginners (2000), set largely in the offices of a women's magazine, is a characteristic example of high-spirited chick lit with a subplot of mum lit and contrasts the fates of three women, one ambitious and separated from her husband, one single and caring and one married to her "dream man", but hampered and exhausted by small children. These are pioneer lives, in a rapidly changing society, and they clearly mirror the aspirations and experiences of millions of readers, who made their creator a bestseller.Some mental health experts argue that women are unhappier now than they used to be because their expectations are too high. They fail to achieve eternal youth and beauty, but are forced to live in a consumer culture that celebrates youth. This, these experts suggest, may be even more painful than the fear that, at the age of 46, they would be sinking into menopausal gloom and thence descending rapidly into old age.I doubt it. All change brings risks. Women are less passive than they used to be, live longer and have more resilience, even though they encounter new hazards as they age. They are still at work on the shape of the future. Marian Keyes, in speaking out about her current desperate state, is already moving on. She is a writer and she will probably write her way out of it. That's what writers do.Margaret DrabbleDepression in adultsWomenHealthMental healthguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Condoleezza Rice Reveals Details of First Memoir The book, called "Extraordinary, Ordinary People," will chronicle Ms. Rice's childhood in Birmingham, Ala., in the 1950's and '60s. feeds.nytimes.com |