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Tuesday 21 February 2012

The Write Advice 009: NORA EPHRON


I think you often have that sense when you write –– that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you’re free of it.  And you’re not, of course; you’ve just managed to set it down on paper, that’s all.

Heartburn (1983)

 

 

Use the link below to read a brief interview with JACOB BERNSTEIN, son of North American screenwriter, director and journalist NORA EPHRON:


https://nypost.com/2016/03/18/nora-ephrons-son-my-mom-whacked-a-lot-of-people/

 

 

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The Write Advice 016: NORA EPHRON

 
The Write Advice 033: TAMA JANOWITZ

 
The Write Advice 045: AMY HEMPEL

 

Wednesday 15 February 2012

The Write Advice 008: BRIAN MOORE


A lot of books today are really just the author talking about himself –– that's fine if you like who the author is; I think you should like the books, without knowing the author.

Interview [The Australian, 1996]

 

 

Use the link below to read a 'lost' 1999 interview with Irish/Canadian novelist BRIAN MOORE:

 

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/brian-moore-my-real-strength-is-that-i-am-a-truthful-writer-1.3726350

 

 

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The Feast of Lupercal (1958) by BRIAN MOORE

 
The Write Advice 005: EDNA O'BRIEN

 
Poet of the Month 016: WB YEATS

Sunday 12 February 2012

Good Grief!! REMEMBERING CHARLES M SCHULZ





CHARLES M SCHULZ
26 November 1922 –– 12 February 2000


 






Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'







Snoopy.  Linus.  Lucy.  Schroeder.  Peppermint Patty.  And, of course, that Everyman for the ages –– good ol’ Charlie Brown.

Nearly all of us can close our eyes and immediately form a picture of what these characters look like.  They’ve become as much a part of Western culture, and of our collective imagination, as the eternally echoing ‘D’oh!’ of Homer Simpson.

It’s amazing how familiar they remain to us twelve years after their creator’s death, how recognizable their faces are even to those of us who would never admit to reading anything as childish as a comic strip –– let alone buying a Peanuts book or watching a Peanuts TV special –– if our ultra-cool lives depended on it.  And what's more remarkable is how familiar and even comforting their personalities are to us, how well we think we know each character as an individual and, in some cases, as a pint-sized reflection of ourselves.  There’s Snoopy the daredevil fighter ace who battles the Red Baron in the skies of World War One France but still manages to sleep safe and sound on top of his doghouse in his owner’s backyard all day.  There’s Lucy the crabby-minded supplier of cheap (and not very useful) psychiatric advice, Schroeder the budding virtuoso and devotee of Beethoven, Linus the philosopher who still needs his security blanket and believes the Great Pumpkin will magically rise from the pumpkin patch to reward all the good children who believe in him come each Halloween.

But the most memorable character is the one who appears to be the least memorable, some might even say the dullest in many ways.  Most heroes are brave, resourceful and admirable.  Sometimes they’re audacious like Bugs Bunny, eccentric like Sherlock Holmes or superheroes in the literal sense like Batman or Captain America.   But not Charlie Brown.  He manages and pitches for what must rate as the world’s most consistently unsuccessful baseball team.  He’s bullied by his dog (who refuses to refer to him as anything but ‘the round-headed kid’), continually embarrasses his little sister Sally and is tricked time and time again by Lucy, who always manages to pull that darned football away right before he kicks it.  His kites routinely get eaten by trees and he’s in love with a little red-headed girl he’s much too shy to talk to while remaining completely oblivious to the fact that Peppermint Patty, whose ball team always beats his, thinks he’s kind of cute. 

He is, to put it another way, everyone who’s ever failed at anything or felt nervous or inadequate or in any other way just plain not good enough, your ordinary run-of-the-mill under-achiever brought vividly to life with just a few carefully placed pen strokes scratched onto paper by an artist who understood the concept that less really does equal more. 




Or, to put it another way, Charlie Brown is you and me.  White or black, rich or poor, bottom of the heap or what we’ve convinced ourselves is the success-defining top of it, the fact remains that all of us feel like losers sometimes, that none of us feel as clever or beautiful or charming or rich or talented or appreciated as we’re entitled to feel sometimes.  That was Schulz’s message if he actually had one to share beyond the very important (and vastly underrated) one of teaching us how to laugh at ourselves.  Recognize your flaws and fess up to what’s ordinary and mediocre in yourself and try not to deplore the same lack of wit, grace and intelligence in others.  Don’t judge.  Don’t sit on your high horse (or in your Ferrari or in the hot tub of your palatial Beverly Hills mansion) telling the world how great you think you are just because you’ve been lucky enough to earn, win or inherit a bit of money.  Be compassionate.  Be generous.  Learn to appreciate people not for what you think they should be but for what they are and what, in many cases, they probably can’t stop being even if they try.

If it’s true that, along with movies and jazz, the comic strip was America’s greatest contribution to twentieth century culture, then Charles M Schulz was its Buster Keaton and its Louis Armstrong all wrapped up in one astoundingly wise, self-effacing package.  His strip, originally titled L’il Folks, broke new ground in terms of what could and couldn’t be done in the comic strip in that it featured no adult characters whatsoever.  (No adult ever spoke or was ever mentioned by name in it, which is now taken for granted but was a revolutionary idea at the time Schulz originally conceived it.)  The action involved the same stock cast of eight or nine main characters, supplemented over the years by the addition of new characters like Pigpen, Franklin (the first negro character to appear regularly in a syndicated US comic strip), Marcie and a peculiar little yellow bird named Woodstock who soon captured the public imagination in the same way his already world-famous friend Snoopy had captured it a decade or two before him.  There were no fistfights or fast-paced action sequences in Peanuts.  No cliffhanging soap opera plots to keep excited readers returning to the strip each day.  Instead, Schulz created a kind of stillness on the page that forced the reader to stop and consider what he was saying whether they happened to agree with the humanist message he was attempting to convey or not.  He made millions of dollars, yes, but few people ever stop to consider how he made his millions –– by giving pleasure, hope and comfort to people every day of his life, alone and unaided, for close to fifty uninterrupted years.




Not bad for a barber’s son from Minnesota whose first published drawing was a picture of his dog and whose work was rejected for inclusion in his own high school yearbook.

Rest in peace, Mr Schulz.  You’ve earned every minute of it.



 
THE CHARLES M SCHULZ MUSEUM is a great place to read more about the life and work of North American cartoonist CHARLES M SCHULZ, as is the official PEANUTS website. 
 


 
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Wednesday 8 February 2012

Selected Poems 1909–1963 (1985) by ANNA AKHMATOVA


Penguin Classics UK, 2006

 Cover Painting by N. ALTMAN





 
THE LAST TOAST

 
 
 I drink to our demolished house,
To all this wickedness,
To you, our loneliness together,
I raise my glass–––

And to the dead-cold eyes,
The lie that has betrayed us,
The coarse, brutal world, the fact
That God has not saved us.

(1934)
                                               









UNTITLED POEM

 
 
If all who have begged help
From me in this world,
All the holy innocents,
Broken wives, and cripples,
The imprisoned, the suicidal ––
If they had sent me one kopeck
I should have become ‘richer
than all Egypt’…
But they did not send me kopecks,
Instead they shared with me their strength,
And so nothing in the world
is stronger than I,
And I can bear anything, even this.

(1961)


 
 
 
 
Translated by
  
DM THOMAS

 
 
 
 
See the end of this post to read two 

*ALTERNATIVE TRANSLATIONS 

of The Last Toast 



 
 
 
 
The Collection:  Lover, wife, artist's model (for the painter Amedeo Modigliani and others), mother, victim and, above all, genius –– these are just some of the terms that might be used to describe the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.

 
Many of Akhmatova's poems –– a good and varied selection of which are included in DM Thomas's outstanding translations of her work –– read like personal questions to God, asking him to explain why he could not be bothered to save her suffering country from the cruelties inflicted on it first by the Bolsheviks and then by 'Iron Joe' Stalin and his henchmen.  It is also evident to anyone who reads her work that she never expected God or anyone else to save Russia, that she had long since resigned herself to loss –– of loved ones, of her home and motherland, of any sense of identity or personal autonomy –– as being part of the natural order of things.

 
It is this sense of resignation, of bravely and unflinchingly accepting what are unavoidable if exceedingly painful truths, which makes Akhmatova's work so compelling and ultimately so powerful.  Her poetry is beautiful not because it relies on beautiful language to describe beautiful things but because she never ceased to lay her own soul bare in it for all the world to see.  'Who can refuse to live his own life?' she is alleged to have asked a friend who tried to offer her sympathy when Stalin sent her son back to the gulag.  She had no use for sympathy.  She had a vision to pursue and she pursued it, in the face of purges, war and privation, alone and undaunted for nearly sixty difficult and incredibly painful years.

 
I get the same feeling from reading an eight line Akhmatova poem like The Last Toast that I get from listening to the music of her contemporary and admirer, the alternately vilified and ‘rehabilitated’ composer Dmitri Shostakovich.  I am reminded of this each time I listen to one of Shostakovich’s late String Quartets, which to my untrained ear seem to be coming from the same lonely and embattled place that gave birth to so much of Akhmatova’s most heartrending poetry.  These were brave people who chose to stay and bear witness to the horrors of Soviet tyranny, artists who refused to flee to safety in the West as so many of their countrymen (eg. Prokofiev, Bunin, Nabokov and Stravinsky) did before and after them.  They somehow found a way to keep making their highly personal statements about loss and suffering while living –– perhaps ‘existing’ would be the more accurate term for it –– within a system that was ruthlessly opposed to all forms of individual expression.  Akhmatova's poetry, as DM Thomas suggests in his introduction, helped to give 'dignity and meaning' to what must surely rate as one of the harshest and most terrifying periods in all of human history.
 
 



ANNA AKHMATOVA, c 1920
 
 
 
The Poet: 'Anna Akhmatova' was born Anna Gorenko at Bolshoy Fontan, near the Ukrainian city of Odessa, on 23 June 1889.  The Gorenko family moved to the town of Tsarkoye-Selo, outside what was then the city of St Petersburg, when she was eleven months old.  The town was to retain a central position in her memories and become a recurring symbol in her work for the remainder of her life.

 
Akhmatova began writing poetry as a child, publishing her first verses as a teenager, none of which are known to have survived.  She deliberately chose to publish under the pseudonym 'Akhmatova,' the surname of her Tatar grandmother, because her nobleman father did not want his respectable name tarnished by having it associated with anything as disreputable as poetry.

 
Akhmatova soon established herself as one of the most exciting of the new young Russian poets, giving readings that attracted the attention of her competitors, including her future husband the 'Acmeist' Nikolai Gumilev and his friends Osip Mandelstam and Sergey Gorodetsky.  Her marriage to Gumilev was not a happy one –– she allegedly told friends that she was never sure she loved him –– and they divorced in 1918 after producing a son named Lev, who was born in 1912.  Gumilev was arrested in 1921, accused of engaging in 'counter-revolutionary activities' and summarily executed by the Bolsheviks shortly afterwards.

 
Akhmatova's life was severely affected by her brief unhappy marriage to Gumilev.  The 1920s were the era of 'guilt by association' and after her husband's arrest her activities were closely monitored by Soviet authorities, who banned her from publishing or giving any public readings of her poetry until 1940.  (It was rumoured that Stalin personally ordered this ban because he felt jealous of a standing ovation the poet had received after giving an especially moving reading of her work in Leningrad.)  Her son Lev was arrested, released and re-arrested by the regime several times, serving lengthy sentences in prisons and labour camps until he was finally freed for good during the 1956 amnesty that followed Stalin's death.  Her third husband, Nikolai Punin, was not so fortunate.  He died in a Siberian gulag in 1953, his case apparently forgotten by everyone except his wife.

Because she was banned from publishing and giving readings of her work, and was afraid to write it down lest it should find its way into the hands of the Cheka (tyrannical forerunner of the KGB), Akhmatova and her friends adopted the practice of committing her unpublished poems to memory to ensure they would survive and not be forgotten.  They were often recited, quietly, among themselves at private parties and other informal gatherings –– a way of being 'heard' and 'read' that allowed her to deceive a regime determined to crush her spirit without actually going to the trouble of arresting and murdering her as it had done with Gumilev and her close friend Osip Mandelstam. 
 
 

ANNA AKHMATOVA, c 1964
 
 
 
Despite the ban on her work, Akhmatova was still one of the most popular and beloved poets in Russia, important enough for Stalin to have her evacuated (along with Shostakovich) from St Petersburg, now renamed Leningrad, to the distant eastern province of Tashkent during the long destructive siege of that city by the Nazis.  She returned to a devastated Leningrad in 1944 and remained there, except for yearly visits to her dacha in Komarovo and a single state-approved trip to the West to receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, until her death in 1966.  Her reputation had been partially restored by this time and much of her work –– although not her two acknowledged masterpieces Requiem and Poem Without A Hero –– gradually began to be re-published, helping to establish her reputation, both in the USSR and abroad, as one of the greatest and most important poets of the twentieth century.

 
 
 
Use the links below to read more translated poetry by ANNA AKHMATOVA and a post about the poet's journals, edited by her friend LYDIA CHUKOVSKAYA, that were published by Northwestern University Press in 2002.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


Vintage/Random House US, 2007

 
 
 
Anna of All the Russias, a biography of the poet written by ELAINE FEINSTEIN, was published by Vintage/Random House in 2007.
 
 
 


Flariella Records US, 2015

 
 
In August 2015 North American singer/songwriter IRIS DEMENT released an album titled The Trackless Woods consisting of eighteen English translations of ANNA AKHMATOVA poems performed to her own minimalist guitar/piano accompaniment.  
 
 
 
Use the link below to read more about the album and listen to (brief) samples of it.  (Her version of The Last Toast is Track 17.)
 
 
 
 



 
 
*ALTERNATIVE TRANSLATIONS 

 
 
PACZE MOJ left the following Comment on this post on 9 February 2012:  

 
I don't know Russian, but I looked up a Polish translation of The Last Toast and it's quite different.

 
I drink for the smashed house,
And my bad life,
For our loneliness together,
And for you I drink,
For the lies of your corruptible lips,
For the ice of dead eyes,
For this cruel, mean world,
And God's perfect coldness.

 
I wonder which one's closer to the original. I don't know any Akhmatova beyond that. The painting on the cover of the Penguin edition has a "composure in the face of suffering and death" feel to it. The face is dark and pained but the clothes and position of the body is elegant.

 
Thanks for bringing her to my attention.

 
 
 
 
Here's another version of The Last Toast translated by JUDITH HEMSCHEMEYER, which appears in the poet's mammoth Complete Poems, originally published by the Zephyr Press in 1997 and reprinted in 2006.
 

I drink to the ruined house,
To the evil of my life,
To our shared loneliness
And I drink to you ––
To the lie of lips that betrayed me,
To the dead coldness of the eyes,
To the fact that the world is cruel and depraved, 
To the fact that God did not save. 


 
 
 
 
 
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Last updated 17 March 2021
 

Wednesday 1 February 2012

The Write Advice 007: GLENDA ADAMS


To me, the language[used by literary theorists] shows a certain hostility for writing and literature, as theorists talk about traditional and experimental writing and urge students to analyse their own work in the language of the criticThe word experimental has been around for so long it evokes a bit of a yawn, and it is meaningless, since all writing is experimental, as the writer tries to work out how to convey his meaning, and in fact what to conveyThere is a ‘not knowing’ that is paramount whenever a writer embarks on a new work and lasts right until the last draft, when the writer has to say this is as good as I can make it right now.

Inspiring Creativity (2007)

 

 

Use the link below to read more about the life and work of Australian novelist, short story writer, educator and journalist GLENDA ADAMS (1939–2007):


https://readglendaadams.blogspot.com/

 

 

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The Write Advice 011: JOHN CLARKE

  
The Write Advice 014: DAVID IRELAND

 
The Write Advice 023: DI MORRISEY