Lily Allen to judge the Orange Prize

The news currently dividing the lit blogs.

I’m finding my ability to formulate a valid opinion somewhat impaired by my jealousy.  Learning that one of my near-contemporaries is to judge a major literary award is a feeling nearly akin to learning that an erstwhile friend is earning a fortune — a feeling with which I’m growing sadly familiar thanks to Facebook and the like.

Personal peeves aside, however, I can’t help but think that while this decision has raised and broadened the profile of the prize in the short term, it might have more damaging long term effects in undermining the integrity of the competition.  A prize which, to some extent, marginalises women writers as much as it celebrates them, has to be very careful to treat the works under discussion with the utmost sensitivity.  To devalue this prize, above all others, could be a step in the wrong direction.

Thoughts, anyone?

Ellie

‘Tis the season to be jolly

Apologies for our recent silence; far from neglecting Hesperus readers, we have been locked away with heads firmly together, concocting our Autumn 2008 list for your delectation.  And, apparently, perfecting our Loyd Grossman impressions.

Well, we’ve deliberated, cogitated and digested, but I am, unfortunately, still bound and gagged as to the precise details of the list.  I can, however, tell you that we are planning a gluttonous and perhaps slightly debauched Christmas 2008, replete with tales of literary inebriation and excess through the ages.  On a more personal note, I am planning a gluttonous and perhaps slightly debauched Christmas 2007, a sentiment which I can imagine finding favour with not a few Hesperus readers.  All those finding themselves in concurrence should stay tuned next week, as I will be twisting arms to have the Bloody Mary recipe to end all Bloody Mary recipes posted by our roaming bonne vivante.

Ellie

Calling All Budding Satirists

Those in the mood for a spot of gentle lampooning of a Thursday afternoon (and who wouldn’t be?)  should be reminded that we are currently running a ‘Brief Lives’ competition.  In celebration of our publication of John Aubrey’s Lives of Eminent Men, we are inviting Hesperus readers to submit Brief Lives of contemporary eminent men (or women). 

Here, by way of inspiration, is Mr Aubrey on Ben Jonson:

He was (or rather had been) of a clear and fair skin; his habit was very plain.  I have heard Mr Lacy, the player, say that he was wont to wear a coat like a coachman’s coat, with slits under the armpits.  He would many times exceed in drink (Canary was his beloved liquor): then he would tumble home to bed, and, when he had thoroughly perspired, then to study.  I have seen his studying chair, which was of straw, such as old women used, and as Aulus Gellius is drawn in.

A few sentences of your most barbed wit could win you a free Hesperus title of your choice, and publication in our online magazine. 

Entries to: erobins[AT]hesperuspress[DOT]com

Ellie

A Sight for Sore Eyes

Although I am loath to employ the blog of this esteemed company as either a public service announcer or, worse, a personal diagnostic tool, this particular request fits loosely within the bounds of things literary.

I’m seeking some detailed information as to the effect on one’s eyes of excessive reading on screen.  I am myopic at the best of times, and I fear that my increasing dependence on the wonderful Project Gutenberg for matters academic and, in fact, virtually everything barring my own shopping lists, is doing me untold damage.  Is anyone in the possession either of some heartening evidence, or better, ocular exercises that can be performed without making oneself appear creepy or deranged?

My myopic thanks to all,

Ellie

Universal Certification

I was horrified to read, in last week’s Bookseller, an argument being put forward for the classification of children’s books. The notion being that ‘People buying children’s books desperately need guidance’ and that ‘While the nation continues to concern itself with getting children reading, one of the most obvious tools, age-ranging on children’s books, remains unexploited’. There is a valid point here, true - children’s literacy is an ongoing concern. But age-ranging? Surely this is counter-productive in the fight to improve the nation’s literacy? Age-ranging by its very nature restricts one’s options…

Ellie and I were heated in our discussion of this on Monday morning: how would classification have affected our own childhood reading, reading which encompassed Lawrence, Hardy, Colette, and Burgess? At this level even Dickens and Austen enter the realms of ’mature content’. The reading of these ‘adult’ texts didn’t turn us into drug-addled, violent, sexually deviant twelve year-olds. I didn’t understand the ‘adult’ themes when I was ten, I read for a story. What the reading of these books did do was increase our vocabularies, encourage us to mimic the sophisticated use of language, and on an even more basic level, it taught us spelling and grammar: and not just words that some middle-aged writer somewhere in the world thought that a five year-old/ten year-old/fifteen year-old would or indeed should know (that’s why I always got ten out of ten in spelling tests. And a far more enjoyable process it was than learning lists of words by rote…). Reading outside our age-range stretched us, and that’s no bad thing.

I chose my books from my parents’ library, not always with their blessing (my poor mother had something resembling a heart attack when she discovered me, aged seven, reading 1984 under the covers when I should have been asleep), but certainly with their direction and encouragement. Quite often towards the nearest dictionary. I as an adult have read a reasonable number of books in my life, and know what each one is about (and why shouldn’t a child now enjoy what I did at the same age?). I am also fairly adept at sight-reading. Do parents really need a Sainsbury’s style colour code on the back of a book these days? 30% of the RDA of ponies. 10% evil witch. What happened to flicking through a couple of pages, or reading the blurb? Especially in this day and age where one doesn’t even need to go to a bookshop to Search Inside. Choosing a book is a process that should have a little time spent on it, not just a cursory ticking of boxes.

Even those books acknowledged as having been written for children would no doubt under these guidelines be considered unsuitable for ‘ages x and under’. My father used to read me the William books. William Brown would surely have an ASBO now. And what about Paddington? Well, there’s an illegal immigrant if ever I saw one. He’d probably not even gone through quarantine. Aslan? Religiously sensitive. I’m not even going to start on the psychedelic aspects of Tolkien’s Middle-earth… Nope, Janet and John will do our children until the age of eight, and then, at the stroke of midnight, they can graduate to Nancy Drew. Why should all children be interested in the same things just because they are of an age? I know I would certainly be offended if I were bought things on the basis of my age/sex/status. It’s the easy way out, and I might hazard that the very reason for the declining literacy levels in our schools is that our children read books which don’t stimulate them. I couldn’t have imagined anything worse than reading about ponies when I was eleven. I’d already graduated to Kafka and Zamyatin.

 KA, Certificate 18

Anyone for a Quickie?

I had been going to indulge in a little rant on a piece I read in last week’s Bookseller, but the day has slipped through my fingers and I need to get home and start mixing my Christmas Pudding, so in my best Public Information cloak I am delighted, nay, ecstatic to announce that We Have Returned to Facebook. There’s not a huge amount up there at the moment as it keeps telling me that I can’t do anything without logging in for the hundredth time and my patience is short, and Christmas Puddings don’t grow in Supermarkets, but I shall endeavour to get it back up to the spangly standards expected of us as soon as is technologically (and humanely) possible. The one thing that concerns me now is the notion of collecting fans. Apparently Penguin have 157 (though since I can’t find them I may well be wrong) and Dorling Kindersley 48. I’m not allowed on eBay as it is, and I fear my competitive streak…

KA, Santa’s Little Helper

ps, anyone know where I can get Barley Wine…?

Rule Britania

In light of this week’s devastating news (or not so devastating as might be the case if one happens to have to have dual nationality, I might even be so bold as to say I feel like I win when I lose: dependent on political climate, of course!) I thought I might offer something from which those not so fortunate as I might take solace, something I read just last week in fact: 

      Somebody said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on Eton playing-fields. It was a particularly unfortunate remark, for the English contribution to the victory of Waterloo depended very much more than is common in victories upon the steadiness of the rank and file in an almost desperate situation. The Battle of Waterloo was won by the stubbornness of the common soldier—that is to say, it was won by the man who had never been to Eton. It was absurd to say that Waterloo was won on Eton cricket-fields. But it might have been fairly said that Waterloo was won on the village green, where clumsy boys played a very clumsy cricket. In a word, it was the average of the nation that was strong, and athletic glories do not indicate much about the average of a nation. Waterloo was not won by good cricket-players. But Waterloo was won by bad cricket-players, by a mass of men who had some minimum of athletic instincts and habits.     

    It is a good sign in a nation when such things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is a bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on. Suppose that whenever we heard of walking in England it always meant walking forty-five miles a day without fatigue. We should be perfectly certain that only a few men were walking at all, and that all the other British subjects were being wheeled about in Bath-chairs…

    The difficulty is therefore that the actual raising of the standard of athletics has probably been bad for national athleticism.

Now there’s something for the weekend: David Beckham leading out the troops at Waterloo anyone?

A free copy of G.K. Chesterton’s The Club of Queer Trades for the first person to name the source correctly!

KA, Abba-esque

Hesperus Press, purveyors of ‘quiet masterpieces’

Hearty thanks from all Hesperus Press to Adam Thorpe for his glowing review of Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees in Saturday’s Financial Times.  It’s rare that a review is written in language almost as evocative as that of the book itself, but Adam Thorpe manages it:

The Maytrees is a painter’s, as well as a poet’s, novel: the scintillant quality of its brightness depends upon the dark areas…

‘The text smells of sea-spray and heather, and is spiced with strange words such as “swale” (a hollow between sand-ridges).

‘Halfway through the book we are given Lou’s quiet death in old age, her still-warm corpse “white above the waterline”. But this is in parenthesis: if the important work happens in life, it follows an inward, spiritual chronology only fiction can render. As well as Herman Mel­ville, something of Dillard’s great Catholic compatriot Flannery O’Connor (who died a semi-invalid in 1964) is there in her unremitting sense of both doom and wonder, in the beauty of her prose and the boldness of her structure. The Maytrees is a quiet masterpiece.’

Glowing commendations there not only for The Maytrees, but also for Adam Thorpe’s own novels Between Each Breath and Birds With a Broken Wing.

Ellie

PS. Please excuse the formatting of this post.  I have almost had a hernia attempting to fix it, and am conceding defeat.  I’ll get you next time, gadget.

Neologisms

I’ve just discovered this post by Mark over at The Book Depository: apparently ‘locavore’ is the Oxford University Press book of the year, as nominated by the American-based Oxford University Press blog.

“Locavore” was coined two years ago by a group of four women in San Francisco who proposed that local residents should try to eat only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius. Other regional movements have emerged since then, though some groups refer to themselves as “localvores” rather than “locavores.” However it’s spelled, it’s a word to watch.

This strikes me as a terrible waste of an award.  There must be thousands of fantastic neologisms generated every year; why celebrate such a downright ugly word?!  My personal favourite of the past year was the invention of a friend, who decided that the unfortunate act of knocking your drinking vessel into your teeth (either before or after consumption of its usually alcoholic contents) was to be known as a ‘kibuttle’.

Ellie

Easing Into The Week

I awoke this morning feeling particularly gloomy (not least, I suspect, because I refuse to turn my heating on and was slightly concerned that my nose had snapped off during the night), so I think a cheery post is in order today.

Victoria over at Eve’s Alexandria has posted her preliminary thoughts on Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees:

Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead and Housekeeping had given it the thumbs up and so I tried the first chapter.  And it turns out to be the kind of book that blows you away, and now I can’t wait to read it.  There is something very Robinson about Dillard’s prose, which is spare and rich at the same time.

I can’t wait to read her final thoughts, not least because the posts at Eve’s Alexandria are always so incredibly thoughtful and thorough.

More kind words came winging their way to Hesperus Headquarters from Todd Swift via Google Alerts.  He has reviewed Rupert Brooke’s Letters from America, published by Hesperus Press earlier this year; in almost Brookian style, he notes that the young scribe and poet

quickly moves on to Ottawa [from Quebec], which he prefers - perhaps the first, and last, foreign visitor to record such a preference.

I feel better already…

Ellie