Jacinda Ardern in
the dogbox: she poses beside a stature of Hercules Morse (“big as a horse”),
part of Tauranga’s
Hairy Maclary
project. Quote unquote:
Ms Ardern said
her mother's maiden name was Bottomley with her grandparents formerly living in
Welcome Bay. “So I feel like I have that nice little connection to Bottomley
Potts,” she said.
Photo by Ruth
Keber for the Bay of Plenty Times.
Adrienne
LaFrance says in the
Atlantic that CDs
are dying – not just the format, but the
actual discs. Quote
unquote:
“All of the
modern formats weren’t really made to last a long period of time,” said Fenella
France, chief of preservation research and testing at the Library of Congress. “They
were really more developed for mass production.”
Which should
give e-book self-publishers pause for thought. Is your e-book future-proof?
Will it be readable on the next generation of e-book readers, or the one after
that? A tech-savvy friend who works in this area says: probably not, especially
if you converted it from a Word document, as many people do. This stuff is much
harder than it looks.
Carl Wilkinson
in the
Financial Times on the
economics of
book festivals. Quote unquote:
I was
listening to AC Grayling in Brighton recently constructing this complex and
fascinating argument about where religion came from. I thought, ‘Where else
would I be able to hear this and have the opportunity of asking him questions?’
I’m not sure I’d find it on television anymore. I think festivals have stepped
into that intellectual space that television has left behind.
Beryl
Bainbridge is one of my favourite novelists: her late-period historical novels
are a masterclass in concision. I had no idea that she was a painter, too. A
really good one, as Rupert Christiansen
reports in the
Daily Telegraph. The
retrospective of
her paintings at Somerset House is on until 19 October and if I win Lotto
I’m going. Quote unquote:
Best remembered
for her superb historical fiction and tragi-comic tales of working-class life,
she was a one-off, writing with quirky wit, concision and originality in a
manner that was always fresh and surprising, sometimes macabre and shocking –
and entirely sui generis. This makes her a writer difficult to catch or
categorise, and one wonders where her reputation will ultimately rest: five
times runner-up for the Booker Prize, she never did anything big or mainstream.
Is she simply a fluent raconteur, spinning excellent yarns, a subtle literary
miniaturist or something altogether darker and more elusive?
The Economist reviews Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for
James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, which tells how the novel was published, banned
and then recognised as a masterpiece. Quote unquote:
With the eye of
a novelist Mr Birmingham enlivens his story with details about these forgotten
characters: how the judge who ultimately overturned the ban in America wore a
tie when playing tennis and how the British lawyer who declared that the novel
was “filthy, and filthy books are not allowed to be imported into this country”
disliked cars, even as late as the 1950s.
Laura Millar at
Salon on
why Hachette is
right and Amazon is wrong, especially from the point of view of self-published
authors. Quote unquote:
Amazon may seem
like your best friend right now, but so it also seemed to traditional
publishers when it appeared in the late 1990s, as a counterbalance to chain
bookstores. A self-publisher is still a publisher and occasionally all
publishers clash with the retailers who bring their wares to market.
Norman Lebrecht
in Standpoint interviews the composer
Harrison Birtwistle, who turns 80 this month.Quote unquote:
Enter the world
of Birtwistle and you do so on his terms. I heard the leader of the BBC
Symphony Orchestra talk of smashing his violin after barely managing to
negotiate the world premiere of Earth
Dances — for me, the most aptly named, riotous work for orchestra since
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Harry
wasn’t bothered.
“What people
don’t understand, Norman,” he said, sitting at his huge draughtsman’s board, “is
that it takes me three days to score from the top of the page to the bottom,
and all I get is a few seconds of music. By the time I’m halfway down, I’m
bored with the idea and want to be doing something else.”
So here is Harrison
Birtwistle’s Earth Dances.
(Irritating visuals: this is strictly for the music, which is best played loud.)
