Perry Anderson in the January 28 issue of the London Review of Books examines the highly topical issue of China's relationship with the West.
Anderson writes "Today, the high-speed growth of the People’s Republic is transforming Western attitudes once again, attracting excitement and enthusiasm in business and media alike, with a wave of fashion and fascination recalling the chinoiserie of rococo Europe. Sinophobia has by no means disappeared. But another round of Sinomania is in the making.
After demolishing the platitudes of Martin Jacques’s When China Rules the World – ‘enthusiasm, however well-meaning, is no substitute for discrimination’ – Anderson goes on to praise ‘two works of outstanding scholarship, from opposite ends of the political and intellectual spectrum’. More here
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Discipline school children with Mozart and William Blake!
Jenna Krajeskiin the New Yorker book blogger writes:
"I remember fondly the newsday that brought the story of a gaggle of unruly teen-age vandals paying for their misuse of Robert Frost’s historic house by giving reluctant audience to the Frost scholar and poet Jay Parini. I have not tracked the 28 students’ progress following the sentence, but let’s assume that the lesson was a success, and that they’re all, at worst, applying to the top tier M.F.A. programs in poetry.
For anyone who thought that kind of strange discipline would sound better with a British accent, here’s a piece out of Derby by way of “Tom Brown’s School Days.” In an effort to curb attendance at after-school detention, administrators at the West Park School have founded a program called “Bach to Basics” during which guilty parties are punished with classical music—Mozart’s Requiem and Verdi's Aida, for example—and with poetry: they are forced to transcribe William Blake’s Jerusalem’.”
Read more here.
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The worst poet in the world?
Christopher Howse in his London Daily Telegraph blog recalls that January 20 is the birthday of Ebenezer Jones, "the worst poet in the world, who was born 190 years ago and died 150 years ago.
“When Jones writes a bad line,” remarked a critic of his day, “he writes a bad one with a vengeance. It is hardly possible to say how excruciatingly bad he is.”
And so said the chorus of leading critics when his first (and last) volume Studies of Sensation and Event came out in 1843.True, “A Tragedy”, by Theophilus Marzials, published in 1872, was later claimed to be the worst poem ever written, with its concluding lines, “Drop / Dead. / Plop, flop. / Plop.” But Marzials had his successes. Ebenezer Jones was utterly rejected.
I must say I find some of his verse hard to follow. Here is an easy stanza from “The Hand”:
'My hand I backward drave
As one who seeks a knife;
When startlingly did crave
To quell that hand’s wild strife
Some other hand; all rife
With kindness, clasp’d it hard
On mine, quick frequent claspings
That would not be debarr’d'."
More here.
------------------ --------------------------------< p>Kindle/Amazon fans punish book that delayed digital edition
There has been much debate in the library world on the pricing and access models of ebooks. Attending a seminar held by Coutts Information Services on Monday 18 January at the National Library of Australia, the general feeling was that ebooks should be available at the same time as the print version, but certainly not after. A recent post on an Amazon blog is indicative of the current debate.
"What impatient folk we are. While publishers are delaying the release of a book's Kindle edition to give the hardcover edition a chance to sell, Kindle readers (kindlers?) despair over the wait.
Case in point: the much buzzed about new book "Game Change," which spills secrets about the 2008 presidential election. The book has been deluged with one-star, negative reviews from apparent Kindle fans who are protesting publisher HarperCollins' decision to delay the Kindle version to Feb 23. Those one-star reviews have contributed to a ho-hum average customer review rating of a 2.5 stars (out of 5). Customer reviews are an important factor for book sales on Amazon, and it will be interesting to see if the Kindle protests spread.
Here's one example of a customer's review of "Game Change": "This is time-sensitive material. No one is going to care in 6 weeks when it is released for the Kindle. People want it now. The publisher is shooting themselves in the foot. They'd have made more money overall by offering the Kindle version now."
More here
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Becoming an opera singer is a lot of hard work
With a son currently touring the US with the Opera Show and a daughter-in-law with Opera Australia, one clearly empathises with a recent piece in the London Times entitled, 'An operatic X Factor? Forget it'.
"ITV’s Popstar to Operastar belittles real singers’ years of training and heartache,” says the tenor Ian Storey.
“My colleagues are angry and incredulous about Popstar to Operastar. A number of singers feel insulted. Young singers fear that it will be harder for them to be taken seriously.
Watching Alex James singing Largo al factotum, from Rossini’s Barber of Seville, was entertaining (the Blur bassist was voted out in the first week) but his onstage rock antics ridiculed opera as an art and cheapened the work that serious opera performers put in to become a performer.
I can’t really say what I thought of Darius Campbell singing Nessun dorma; you wouldn’t be able to print it. Two things stood out for me: it’s obviously not in the right key and the aria was shortened. This misrepresents what we do. Are they trying to show how hard it is to be an opera singer? The program doesn’t give an impression of even 1 per cent of what you have to go through to make it.
This is a missed opportunity to show people what the life of an opera singer really is. Why not follow a young singer to auditions? Instead of showing pop singers crying because they are terrified of singing an aria that they have no preparation to sing, they could show an opera singer crying after a heavy rehearsal in which a strict and rude conductor demanded maybe more than they could give. Or crying after reading a bad review after all the work, hardships and illnesses they’ve been through and overcome. Or crying after being rejected in 20 auditions and having to struggle for money to pay the rent."
More here.
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Why is the Devil still so popular?
The Times Literary Supplement in a review article headed "Satan Rules" notes "the Devil has been an inspirational figure - for Goethe, Heine, W. S. Gilbert, Paul Valéry, Berlioz, Gounod, Turgenev and Randy Newman, among others. Why is he still so popular, James Sharpe asks, "long after witch-burning and demonic possession ceased to be acceptable phenomena"?
One of the problems of living in a secular society is the lack of any generalised conception of evil. The word is used often enough, notably when the headline – writers of tabloid newspapers wish to draw their readers’ attention to a particularly heinous murder. But even here, “evil” remains ill-defined, and we are in any case accustomed to having the conduct of those of our fellow citizens whom we might, in unguarded moments, describe as “evil” explained in more familiar and accessible terms by social workers and psychiatrists. Evil behaviour is the outcome of social or mental conditions rather than some abstract or personalised force."
More here.
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10 of the best poisonings in literature
John Mullan in the British Guardian, lists 10 of the best poisonings in literature. These include:
Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie
Christie (who had worked as a pharmacy dispenser) used poison to do away with more than 30 victims in the course of her 66 novels. In Cards on the Table Poirot uncovers the perfidy of Dr Roberts, who kills one man with an injection of anaesthetic and another by applying Bacillus anthracis to the victim's shaving brush. All it takes is one little nick from his razor.
A Shroud for a Nightingale by PD James
This whodunit is set in a nursing home, where trainee nurse Jo Fallon dies from a dose of insecticide added to her whisky. To find the culprit Inspector Dalgleish will uncover lesbian passions and a matron with a Nazi past.
The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
Doyle was a doctor and made his sleuth an expert toxicologist. When he has to crack the "locked room" murder of Bartholomew Sholto, he soon spots what appears to be a poisoned thorn lodged in the victim's skin. His anthropological knowledge allows him to surmise that the killer was an Andaman Islander, using a poisoned dart. He is not wrong."
More here.
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Dolly Parton 'I'm artificial, but it comes from a sincere place'.
Hugo Rifkind in the The Times of London has an entertaining interview with Dolly Parton.
"It’s pathetic, everybody on our press trip to Nashville agrees beforehand, the way people always kick off interviews with Dolly Parton by mentioning her breasts. But then you meet her, and bloody hell, how could you not? She’s not so much dressed as upholstered, in clothes that can only be sewn on. “I have always admired natural beauties,” she tells me, once we are settled in a corner of her Nashville compound that has been decked out, I suppose, to look like a boudoir. “But I am not one. Never have been.”
Oh come on, I start to say. I’ve seen ... “You’ve seen worse?” Dolly hoots, and then guffaws. “Me too!”
No, I tell her. I was going to say I had seen photos of the young Dolly. If she wasn’t a natural beauty she started making a hell of an effort very early on.
“I did,” she says. “I started bleaching my hair as soon as I could get money to buy bleach. Before that it was that dishwater colour. I’d get the tar beat out of me for bleaching it, but I’d do it anyway. I just felt like a blonde. Don’t even know what colour my hair is now. It’s probably grey. Don’t want to see, don’t want to know.”
Where does one start with the cult of Dolly Parton? She’s 63 now, but her skin is both baby-soft and Jacko-pale. She’s the richest country artist in history, she gave her name to the world’s first cloned sheep and she’s the biggest employer in a whole Tennessee town. She’s a gay icon despite being from the red-blooded Deep South, and a feminist icon despite looking like Dolly Parton."
More here.
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Odd book title
The Fangs of Suet Pudding. Adams Farr. Gerald G. Swan, 1944.
Debbie Campbell at the National Library notes this is a very rare book with no global holdings according to WorldCat.
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