Posts by Carol Stewart
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Muse: Shelf Life: The Dying Elephant in…, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Very well said, sir.
This from High Tide in Tucson by Barbara Kingsolver:Why isn't the author's written word enough? Why must she follow her book out into the world like an anxious mother, to hold its hand and vouch for its character? Why, for that matter, is a book more desirable when it has the author's signature on the flyleaf? .. Certainly I would go along peacefully with the book tour concept if it were only a matter of my own temporarily disturbed life. But in principle it's an industry trend that worries me. Celebritisation of authors rivets the nation's attention on a handful of books each hear, shutting out diversity, leaving poets and first novelists to huddle in the cold with the masses of nonfiction scholars whose subject matter is more vital than it is sexy.
Readers do need help, of course, in selecting among all the many deserving titles - but what criteria that could possibly fit in a fifty-eight second TV spot will guide them to an informed choice? The quality of a book's prose means nothing in this race. What will win it a mass audience is the author's ability to travel, dazzle, stake out name recognition, hold up under pressure, look good and be witty - qualities unrelated, in fact, to good writing, and a lifestyle that's writing's pure nemesis.
What of the brilliant wordsmiths who happen to be elderly, disabled, or indisposed to travel because of young children, or not so great looking, or terribly shy? What are we doing here to the future of literature? Where would be be now if our whole literary tradition were built upon approximately the same precepts as the Miss America competition? -
Muse: Shelf Life: The Dying Elephant in…, in reply to jessica scott,
You're right, Jessica. The Island Bay Stationers is a wee gem, particularly for picture books. We used to go there a lot when my lad was younger and we'd often find offbeat and wonderful things. The owner really knows her stock well too.
I am very fond of both Unity Books and the Children's Bookshop in Kilbirnie
+3 for the family bookworms.
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Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to Islander,
Worth reproducing, I feel:
There’s a wonderful family called Stein:
There’s Gert and there’s Ep and there’s Ein.
Gert’s poems are bunk,
Ep’s statues are junk,
and no one can understand Ein. -
Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit, in reply to Islander,
Islander - you're most welcome. I've just finished reading Matt Ridley's biography of Francis Crick, which is a great read. Crick had an amazingly productive and varied career and turned his attention to the study of consciousness late in his life, in partnership with Koch. He knew it was an elusive concept - but then so was the gene, before the structure of DNA was found.
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Joining in late as ever, there's some interesting material here on Christof Koch's homepage. He and Francis Crick were among the first to approach consciousness as a scientifically tractable problem.
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Nil twatcockum carborundum
Hmmm. Doesn't quite work. twatcock is irreducibly Anglo-Saxon -
The politically correct fairy tales ..
There once was a young person named Red Riding Hood who lived with her mother on the edge of a large wood. One day her mother asked her to take a basket of fresh fruit and mineral water to her grandmother's house -- not because this was womyn's work, mind you, but because the deed was generous and helped engender a feeling of community.
were definitely offered in this spirit.
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I'm trying to think of the last time an adult novel made me really feel something.
I thought this Guardian interview with the wondrous David Mitchell was sweet - one of the questions was what had made him cry of late, and he said that it was reading Kate de Goldi's book Billy.
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I suppose it shouldn't be surprising, given his Vicar-of-Bray principle-free populism, but I was bemused to see Peter Dunne nailing his colours to the mast in pandering to the anti-1080 crowd.
It's depressing how many minor party contenders there are for The Party That Science Forgot. -
The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.
G.B. Shaw.