| Philip Roth's proofs, Keats's vowels, and more It seems that Philip Roth is, or at least was, a devil for rewriting on galleys: the surgery on the page reproduced there is all for the better, but I can see at least one sentence that's going to need correcting again on the next proof.• Intelligent conjectures about Keats's voice, without too much stress on the "cockney" cliché. (The author also provides bonus material.)• In some places, the wordage rate on short stories has remained unadjusted for inflation over 80 years; and that's where there is a rate...• Against collaboration.• Another wordy wonder from Wondermark: who knew that Yahweh had a collective noun?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 |
Museum of storytelling planned for Oxford Anonymous £2.5m donation paves the way for a major new children's attraction, due to open in 2014From Lewis Carroll's Wonderland to JRR Tolkien's Middle-earth, CS Lewis's Narnia and the parallel universes of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Oxford has played host to some of the UK's most enduring literary creations. Now a £2.5m donation from an anonymous private benefactor means the first steps have been taken towards the creation of a museum dedicated to storytelling in the city.The Story Museum has existed online for the past four years, holding events across Oxfordshire and running storytelling pilots in schools, but the donation enables it to start constructing a permanent home in Oxford. It has just signed a lease on Rochester House, a Victorian building a stone's throw from Christ Church College – where many scenes in the Harry Potter movies are filmed – on Pembroke Street. It now needs to raise a further £11m to transform the building into a museum, which will aim to attract 100,000 visitors a year when it opens in 2014.Children will be able to listen to stories at the museum, to "walk through" them, to create stories of their own and to "open windows and go through doorways into other worlds", according to the team behind the museum, described as a cathedral to the children's story by trustee and children's publisher David Fickling."Dreams do come true: we are absolutely delighted to have a real home at last," said the museum's director Kim Pickin. "Rochester House has its roots in the Victorian era, when Oxford began producing children's stories that are known and loved across the world. Lewis Carroll himself would have known the building." Spokesperson Cath Nightingale said the donor wished to remain anonymous.Pullman, who lives in Oxford and set his bestselling fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials in two different versions of the city, is a patron for the museum, along with fellow former children's laureates Michael Morpurgo and Jacqueline Wilson. "The Story Museum will be a wonderful gift from Oxford, where so many stories have begun, to the whole world," Pullman said. "The whole atmosphere of the city is rich with fantasy. Indeed, the very idea of having a museum devoted to story is itself such a fantastical notion than no other city in the world could have given birth to it."Carroll wrote his Alice books in Oxford in the 19th century, Tolkien and Lewis would meet to discuss their work in the city's Eagle and Child pub in the 1930s and 40s, and Kenneth Grahame wrote The Wind in the Willows in Oxfordshire. "There must be something in the waters of the Isis that gets into the system of Oxford residents, magically causing them to think of and bring to life unforgettable characters and plots," said Oxfordshire-based children's author Mary Hoffman.Oxford resident and Duncton Wood author William Horwood said there was "clearly something going on in Oxford which doesn't happen in other cities". "From where I'm sitting at this moment I've got within a radius of less than two miles Kenneth Grahame, Charles Dodgson [Carroll], Tolkien, Philip Pullman and CS Lewis," he said. "There is a literary tradition associated with Oxford going back to medieval times. People read here. The spirit of the word is here. Also there's the fact that the colleges are basically monastic institutions – you've got corridors within corridors, staircases within staircases, doors which open onto magical gardens. It's hardly surprising that something like Alice in Wonderland came straight out of Oxford."The museum's team is now planning a feasibility study to establish how to create the Story Museum, and is also putting together a "major public campaign" for 2010 to raise the £11m it needs if it is to open by 2014, in time for Oxford's bid to become Unesco's World Book Capital that year.Children and teenagersHeritageAlison Floodguardian.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: The Illustrator With these plainspoken, charming “letters,” the renowned illustrator counsels an imaginary pen pal in his trade. feeds.nytimes.com |
Rumi's Masnavi, part 4: Rumi's Sufism | Franklin Lewis Sharia and the external observance of religious rules are only the beginning for the seeker after truthYou attain to knowledge by argument;You attain a craft or skill by practice;If voluntary poverty's your choice,companionship's the way, not hand or tongue.The knowledge of it passes soul to soul,not by way of talk or reams of notes.Its signs are writ upon the seeker's heart,yet still the seeker cannot ken those signsuntil his heart becomes exposed to lightThen God reveals His: Did We not expose? [Qur'an 94:1]for We've exposed the chambers of your breastand placed the exposition in your heartMasnavi 5: 1062-7Not every wayfarer who sets out on the path may attain the goal, but for Rumi it is the Sufi path which offers the best potential of attaining to true knowledge. But what exactly does Rumi understand by Sufism and the quest? And how does this mystical way relate to the path of Sharia, or religious law? Neither a separate religion nor a sect of Islam, the Sufi path (tariqa) is rather a mode of religious observance and a method of self-training and purification, the goal of which is to orient the believer to a religiously-informed spirituality of experience. Rumi's Sufism rests upon traditional practices like prayer and fasting (eg, Masnavi 3:2147-74 and 5: 1749-51), pilgrimage (though the idea of 'interior' pilgrimage, and not the outward ritual of Hajj is emphasised, eg, Masnavi 2: 2231-2251), control of baser impulses, and following the example of the prophet. It also depends upon the companionship, or sohbat, of a guide who has progressed along the path and can initiate the novice, helping him establish a praxis and habitus above and beyond what is found in the sharia (eg, Masnavi 1:722-26, 2687-88). The brotherhood of Rumi's followers, the Mevlevis, established a rule requiring a novice perform three years of service to the community before engaging in the sama, or "spiritual concert" – the stylized motive meditation, or turning ceremony, performed as a group, which earned them the nickname of the "whirling dervishes". This practice is not condoned by all Muslims. And to many Sunni Muslims, Rumi's belief in the spiritual axis mundi, or pivot, who sustains the spiritual universe with the aid of a hierarchy of saints, appears quite heterodox (Rumi himself distinguishes this from the Shia belief in hereditary imams).So in every age, a saint arises ...whether seated before you or hid from sightHe is like light and wisdom is his GabrielThe lesser saints but lamps lit up by him ...Light emanates in grades as per a scheme,for seven hundred veils obscure Truth's lightand all these veils of light stack up in tiers.Behind each veil there stands a certain folk –these veils – rank after rank up to the top …Masnavi 2: 815-22Though some Muslims may find Rumi and Sufism unorthodox, Rumi does not reject the Sharia, but rather assumes that it is the rudiments of religion. As he explains in the prose introduction to book five of the Masnavi, the Sharia is like a candle that lights the way – without that candle we cannot even see to set foot on the spiritual path. But once the path is illuminated by the law, the wayfarer must begin the quest, and his action of walking along the way is the Sufi mode (tariqa). The goal of the quest is nothing short of truth (haqiqa). Rumi also uses the analogy of alchemy or medicine – Sharia is like the theoretical knowledge about transmutation of the elements, or about pharmacology that one reads in books or notes down from a lecture. It is in walking the Sufi tariqa that we gain the experience of applying the chemical reagents to the metal, or following the proper diet and medical regimen. Copper attains to truth in its transmutation to gold. Those who know only the theory revel in the theory; those who experiment with the substance revel in the experiment; whereas those who have been transmuted revel in being gold. The attainment of true health consists in dying to the passions of the world; having died to the world, both the law and the path fade into nothingness, and only the face of God remains in the field of vision (Qur'an 28:88)Paradoxically, though, this dying to self opens up the possibilities of a theology of love, a vista onto the central animating feature of Rumi's Sufism and his Masnavi, which we will consider next.In one description (Masnavi 1: 3151-56), Rumi tells why kings seat sufis in front of themselves, whereas they have the royal guards stand to the left, and ministers and secretaries stand at their right:They give the Sufis pride of place in frontwho like mirrors to the eye, reflect soulBurnished by remembrance, contemplation,their mirror-hearts receive pristine image …Beauty's in love with its mirror image,burnishing souls, instilling God in hearts.PoetryPhilosophyReligionIslamFranklin Lewisguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Tate to show hidden Blakes Consumed by flames, contorted in ecstasy ... William Blake's lost depictions of the torments of hell have been acquired by the TateTormented images of human ï¬gures consumed by flames, floundering in murky waters or contorted in ecstasy or anguish, by one of the greatest and oddest geniuses in British art, William Blake, have been acquired by the Tate after a £441,000 fundraising appeal. The rich, dense, hand-applied colour is as fresh as if newly made, on eight sheets which were lost for almost 200 years until they turned up tucked into an Edwardian international train timetable in a box of secondhand books. They were inherited by Blake's widow, Catherine, who had worked on them as his studio assistant, when he died in 1827. A note on the back of the sheets records she gave them to a man called Frederick Tatham – but then they disappeared without trace until a book lover bought them at a sale in north London in 1978. He wishes to remain anonymous, but last year offered them to the Tate as a single group if it could raise the purchase price. The money came from Tate members and patrons, the public, and a £141,000 donation from the Art Fund charity – whose new director, Stephen Deuchar, has just left as head of Tate Britain. They have been exhibited just once since they were found, to protect the colour, but will go on display at the Tate next summer. Next winter they will be seen at the Pushkin museum in Moscow, in an exhibition on Blake and British art. Blake, who chatted with the angels he saw perched in a tree, and sat naked in his London garden with Catherine, emulating what he saw as the lost innocence of Adam and Eve, created the etchings through a complicated process he largely invented. The etchings, hand-printed and ï¬nished in pen and ink and layers of colour, were created as separate individual works, but based on images from his series of books in the 1790s in which he created his own prophetic universe. Alison Smith, the Tate curator who has been working on the plates, said: "There is something deeply visceral about them – you feel they take you straight into the mind of Blake." "This set is unique because they have terse but powerful captions added by Blake: the ï¬gure in flames is captioned 'I sought pleasure and found pain unutterable' – that says it all, really."ArtTate BritainWilliam BlakePaintingMaev Kennedyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |