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| Viz Comic takes over the Guardian On the occasion of its 30th birthday, Britain's fourth or fifth funniest comic does its business - Warf! Warf! – all over our pages. Click the images on the right of the story for our exclusive Viz stripsThis month sees the 30th anniversary of "the magazine that's not as funny as it used to be". Viz, Chris Donald's foul-mouthed comic, evolved from a 12-page fanzine hawked around Newcastle's pubs into one of the country's highest-selling titles, shifting over a million copies an issue with celebrity fans ranging from David Bowie to Simon Bates. Since that 1990 peak, sales have declined to around the 100,000 mark; however, the comic which first posed the then-unanswered question "Morrissey; pop genius or twat?" is still going strong as it enters its fourth decade.Viz's influence on British comedy has been profound. Its squalid brand of anarchy and self-referential surrealism is present in everything from Mitchell and Webb and The League Of Gentlemen to Little Britain and The Daily Mash. And while its writers resist serious analysis, Viz's most overlooked quality has always been a furious intelligence.As its numerous, pathetic imitators (Smut, Zit, Brain Damage etc) proved, a comic cannot survive on profanity alone and Viz strips like Biffa Bacon, Sid The Sexist and The Fat Slags tell you more about the national character than many literary heavyweights. In a tongue-in-cheek documentary, Auberon Waugh suggested that "if the future generations look back on the literature of the age, they'll more usefully look to Viz than they would, for instance, the novels of Peter Ackroyd or Julian Barnes, because Viz has a genuine vitality of its own which comes from the society which it represents". His favourite strip was The Bottom Inspectors, by the way.The classic premise of situation comedy has always been that of a man trapped in his surroundings; and this is the case in Viz's finest strips, the characters poignantly locked in a doomed cycle by their giant testicles, religious fervour, undiagnosed autism, painful haemorrhoids, and terminal stupidity. Writer Graham Dury claims a core readership of "the well educated, the unemployed and people in prison" and Viz speaks to the parts of Britain that have a simmering and instinctive dislike of the rich, the show-offs, the moronic and the vain.Viz has been entirely prescient about where our culture is going. Once, its obsession with third-rate celebrities, Roger Mellie's endless ideas for cheap television ("I've got an idea, Tom – Celebrity Shit Bucket!"), dishonest overselling, and ludicrously hyperbolic real-life stories seemed like flights of fancy. Now, they look like the vast majority of the modern media."We pride ourselves on the fact you're no cleverer when you've read Viz," says Dury. "You might have had a few laughs, but you've not learnt anything." If that really is the case, then the fault lies with the reader, not the comic.VizComicsJustin Quirkguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Poetry workshop Fathers and fatherhood have spawned much great poetry, and this month poet and creative writing teacher Roger Robinson wants to read your take on this most intimate of subjectsRoger Robinson is a Trinidadian poet and playwright who has lived in London for 20 years. He has performed worldwide, is an experienced workshop leader and lecturer on poetry, and was chosen by Decibel as one of 50 writers who have influenced the Black-British canon over the past 50 years. His workshops have been nominated for a Gulbenkian Prize and he was part of the Webby award-winning team of online workshops for the Barbican's Can I Have a Word. He has published a book of short fiction, Adventures in 3D (2001) and two poetry collections. The first, Suitcase, came out in 2004; his new book, Suckle, was published in July 2009 by Waterways Press and won the People's book prize.Take a look at his workshop on fathers and fatherhoodFathers play an important role in our lives' development. Many lessons we learn about ourselves come directly from what our fathers have done or said, while even the absence of a father teaches us about ourselves. Becoming a father is a time of revelation, memory and insight. This is why fathers and fatherhood are so ripe for investigation through poetry. The memories of fathers or father-figures are full of epiphany and peak experience. Let's look at some of my favourite poems about fatherhood and then move on to some stimulus questions to help get you writing.The Gift by Li-Young LeeTo pull the metal splinter from my palmmy father recited a story in a low voice.I watched his lovely face and not the blade.Before the story ended, he'd removedthe iron sliver I thought I'd die from.I can't remember the tale,but hear his voice still, a wellof dark water, a prayer.And I recall his hands,two measures of tendernesshe laid against my face,the flames of disciplinehe raised above my head.Had you entered that afternoonyou would have thought you saw a manplanting something in a boy's palm,a silver tear, a tiny flame.Had you followed that boyyou would have arrived here,where I bend over my wife's right hand.Look how I shave her thumbnail downso carefully she feels no pain.Watch as I lift the splinter out.I was seven when my fathertook my hand like this,and I did not hold that shardbetween my fingers and think,Metal that will bury me,christen it Little Assassin,Ore Going Deep for My Heart.And I did not lift up my wound and cry,Death visited here!I did what a child doeswhen he's given something to keep.I kissed my father.One of the interesting things about this poem is how the speaker aligns the tenderness of his father with the tenderness he is now showing to his wife. When poems talk about the present in terms of the past it imbues a strong emotional resonance. It's like walking backward into your future while always looking at your past.My Papa's Waltz by Theodore RoethkeThe whiskey on your breathCould make a small boy dizzy;But I hung on like death:Such waltzing was not easy.We romped until the pansSlid from the kitchen shelf;My mother's countenanceCould not unfrown itself.The hand that held my wristWas battered on one knuckle;At every step you missedMy right ear scraped a buckle.You beat time on my headWith a palm caked hard by dirt,Then waltzed me off to bedStill clinging to your shirt.Every time I read this poem I'm always amazed by it's emotional intensity. The way it creates it is by being very specific in its reference to senses: "the whiskey on your breath", "romped until the pans slid from the kitchen shelf" "battered on one knuckle" and "palm caked hard by dirt". Appealing to the senses is the only equation we have in writing to get the reader to feel what we feel with a moment to moment response. Try to get some senses in your poem. Think about smell taste ,sight, touch, and sound. Also think about where they would fit to heighten the emotional quotient of the poem. Those Winter Sundays by Robert E Hayden Sundays too my father got up earlyand put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,then with cracked hands that achedfrom labor in the weekday weather madebanked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.When the rooms were warm, he'd call,and slowly I would rise and dress,fearing the chronic angers of that house,Speaking indifferently to him,who had driven out the coldand polished my good shoes as well.What did I know, what did I knowof love's austere and lonely offices?I chose this poem because it's a great example of an elegiac poem that comes from just concentrating on an action and the significance of it. Sometimes in poetry it's good to focus on a specific relevant moment and then explore what lesson you learnt from that moment that you carry with you all your life. Finding greater significance in small seemingly insignificant moments is always a good route to a poem.So now we've looked at the poems here are a few stimulus questions to help you create your own poems about fatherhood.Choose a simple task that the father in your poem does and examine its wider significance to you nowTry to think about how what you have learned from your father in the past helps you nowUse the senses so that we can feel a sense of being there. Think about sight, taste. touch smell and soundHow would you describe the father in your poem? Use obvious words/phrasesWhat habits does the father in you poem have? It's all about the little details.What do they ALWAYS say?What do you always picture them wearing?Do they have any hobbies/interests/things they always do?Is there a place you associate with this person, or visited with him?Do you have any other special memories of this person?Be aware of the structure, story, music and imagination of the poem.Please submit your entry (pasted into the email, rather than as an attachment) to books.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk before midnight on Wednesday December 2.Poetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Theo Walcott sold to Random House Children's Books England winger signs four-book deal to write footballing adventures based on his own experiences as a schoolboyRandom House has jumped the gun on the January transfer window, signing the Arsenal and England winger Theo Walcott for an undisclosed fee on a four-book deal. According to the publisher, the footballer is due to be "working with a writer" to produce a series of novels for children based on his career so far, though the identity of the author involved is a closely-guarded secret.The 20-year-old striker, who made his debut for the national side at the record-breaking age of 17 and earlier this year signed a four-year contract at Arsenal reported to be worth £60,000 a week, said he was "really excited to be working on the series.""Books played an important part in our family life as I was growing up," he said.The series is due to launch in April 2010, and follows hot on the heels of a series from Walcott's predecessor on England's right wing, David Beckham, which kicked off earlier this year. The first two titles in Walcott's story are due to chart the arrival of a boy who shares Walcott's childhood nickname, TJ, at a new school. Even though he's never played a proper football match before in his life, TJ falls in with a group of children who love football."Many of my experiences as a young footballer will be relived by TJ in the series," Walcott explained.The 128-page books, with black-and-white illustrations throughout, are aimed at readers aged 9-11 – an age when many boys lose the reading habit.The children's author Mal Peet, whose retelling of Othello as the story of a South American football star won this year's Guardian children's fiction prize, confessed that he was unworried by the prospect of a new player in children's fiction."The scowly part of me thinks, 'Oh yeah, another celebrity publishing deal, taking the bread from the mouths of proper writers like me'," he said. "But the cheerier part of me thinks it might be quite a good thing. If you can turn young people's enthusiasm for football into an enthusiasm for books then everyone's a winner."The relentlessly positive upswing of Theo Walcott's life so far might prove a challenge, he continued, but "it's all down to the ghostwriter. "They didn't offer me the gig - if they had I'd have probably turned them into ghost stories or something. It's very hard to write about football and make it exciting and appealing to both boys and girls. We're not short of crap."In terms of plotting it lacks a little something, in terms of harrowing setbacks and so on. I can't see these having much of a dark side. The fact that Walcott is a great player doesn't mean anything about the quality of a book with his name on the front cover." Publishers have a responsibility to "do this well", he added. "If all you read is two Theo Walcott books and they're both rubbish, like the David Beckham Academy books, it's not going to encourage you to become an avid reader."But as an Arsenal fan, Peet said that he would "wish him luck".The managing director of Random House Children's Books, Philppa Dickinson welcomed the new signing. "Theo is an incredibly talented player and electrifying to watch in the field," she said. "We are thrilled to be publishing his books."Children and teenagersSport and leisureTheo WalcottRichard Leaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Seeking a Cure for Optimism The power of positive thinking is under assault, with a number of writers and researchers questioning the notion that looking on the bright side makes much of a difference. feeds.nytimes.com |
Hell on earth: John le Carré on Congo 'We are talking of a country being held to ransom, a country that has no memory of deciding its own fate, only of desperate need, terrible violence and self-hatred, and the rule of the gun'A couple of years ago, on a brief research trip to eastern Congo, I chanced on a hillside village high above the old ÂBelgian colonial town of Bukavu, and fancied myself for a moment transplanted to a Âvillage in plague-stricken Europe in medieval times: children, scary-eyed and brain-damaged by undernourishment, Âhobbling towards us, old hags of 40, teenage polio victims paddling themselves along on bits of packing case, deformed and toothless faces smiling grotesquely as they begged, young bodies scarred, broken and hideously regrown.On other journeys, I liked to think, I had seen some of the least fortunate people on earth – in the worst slums of Cairo and Nairobi – but never before had I set eyes on a community that, for generation after generation, had been denied even the most elementary medical care. Yet these people, and millions like them, are the real victims of near-perpetual warfare. On any average day of the year, 1,450 Congolese die of war's twin side-effects: disease and malnutrition.How did it happen? Where to begin? Nowhere on earth has suffered more terribly from the Âconsequences of colonial rule than Congo. The very word colonial doesn't begin to encompass the scale of human misery, greed and cruelty that have been visited on Congo by foreign predators throughout its history, whether we talk of Arab slavers or the pillaging of the country's people and riches by the appalling King Leopold of the Belgians, or the murder in 1961, with Belgian and US connivance, of Congo's first elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, just one year after the country obtained its independence.And who was America's choice to replace Lumumba, seen as too leftist, too nationalist, too unpredictable? One Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, whose 30 years of ever more demented misrule, corruption and proxy wars against perceived Âenemies of western alliance reduced Congo to a condition of social and Âeconomic collapse from which it is still to recover. Those with a mind to explore the horror of Congo's wars over the last 50 years can do no Âbetter than treat themselves to Michela Wrong's In The Footsteps Of Mr Kurtz and Thomas ÂPakenham's The Scramble For Africa.But its own wars aside, Congo's greatest ÂmisÂfortune has been to play host to the wars of other countries. In the aftermath of the Rwandan Âgenocide, Hutu insurgents fled across the border and used eastern Congo as a base from which to launch attacks on their Tutsi enemies still in Rwanda. When the Tutsis retaliated in kind, it was Congo that paid the blood price.The first Congo war had barely raged itself out before the second followed. Warlords ruled. ÂRoaming militias fought, looted and killed at will. Mass rape and the mutilation of women became a military weapon, destroying tribal and family life. Still today, in eastern Congo, thousands of men and children are condemned to slave labour in gold, diamond and tin mines, frequently at ÂCongolese army gunpoint, always in Âunimaginably appalling conditions. Congo's Âmineral reserves are the Âlargest on the planet, yet three-quarters of its population live on less than a dollar a day. Mining companies raise billions on stock markets, but 60m Congolese have yet to see the smallest Âbenefit from their country's wealth.What is to be done?A better question is: what is not to be done?We must not take shelter behind the notion of democracy as a cure-all. Yes, yes, it was admirable and right that Congo, in 2006, held its first free – or fairly free – elections since the murder of Lumumba. Democracy at last. But little has changed. And little can. Without a civil society to support it, how can democracy act as a panacea?We are talking of a country 1,300km long, most of it forested, with a largely illiterate population whose size can be only roughly estimated, with neither a functioning judiciary nor a police force, nor a basic educational or medical system, and barely a hard road; of a country, just as before, being held to ransom by its own government, army and rival militias, in every avenue of life, be it Âmining, trade or elementary social mechanisms; of a country that has no memory of deciding its own fate, only of desperate need, terrible violence and self-hatred, and the rule of the gun.What overnight miracle do we expect to have occurred on the morning after Democratic ÂElection Day? Not a western-style parliament complete with upper chamber and official oppoÂsition, that's for sure. A more likely outcome is that the electorate, where it can be brought to the polling booths, will vote on knee-jerk tribal lines, the winner will take all and the loser will take to the jungle. Which is pretty much what happened in 2006. So much for democracy as the cure.Neither should we take shelter behind the easy notion of economic aid – or not without first insisting on the donors' right (and obligation) to follow every penny of the cash all the way to its proper destination. With corruption endemic at every level of life – and raised to an art form by Congo's less scrupulous western trading partners – the hardest trick in the box is to bring aid where it is most desperately needed. In this respect at least, Britain's record in Congo is for once a happy one. We have kept our national interests on a leash. We have been generous and prudent.The same can hardly be said for the World Bank, which looked on while the government signed away 75% of its copper and cobalt reserves in three highly questionable deals that yielded next to nothing for its state or people.And finally, however intractable Congo's ills may appear, and however drained of compassion we may feel in the face of Darfur and other hells, we must never turn away our gaze. Indeed, we have a moral duty to look, which is what these photographs are telling us. To observe pain only through the prisms of the boardroom and the computer screen is to sever the vital artery between compassion and action. The continuing human tragedy of Congo is not a statistic. It is a continuing human tragedy. It is 1,450 tragedies every day. It is countless more if you include the orphaned, the bereaved, the widowed and all the ripples of truncated lives that spread from a Âsingle death. It is you and me and our children and our parents, if we had had the bad luck to be born into the world these photographs portray.But Congo has one secret that is hard to pass on if you haven't learned it at first hand. Look Âcarefully and you will find it in these pages: a Âgaiety of spirit and a love of life that, even in the worst of times, leave the pampered westerner moved and humbled beyond words.• This is an edited extract from John le Carré's foreword to The Rape Of A Nation, by Marcus Bleasdale, published by Thames & Hudson at £32.50. To order a copy for £29.50, with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.Democratic Republic of the CongoJohn Le CarréPhotographyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |