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Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Book Club Blog Heroine Wendy James is back - alive and punching!

- Wendy James, now 38, has ended her 11 year retirement since 1993's "Now Aint The Time For Your Tears" and relaunched herself as Racine. At long last she can now be found online at The Racine World where she declares in her typical style that "as The Racine World gets bigger you’ll find The Racine World also gets smaller." Bless her.

- Metro has run through its 60 second interview with Wendy, who it turns out, is living happily in NYC of all places having become tired of walking up and down Portobello Road for 15 years. Wendy's new single "Grease Monkey" is out on September 20th, and the new album "Number 1" is out on the 27th September.

- Sunday Mail, "THE LADY OF THE VAMP BITES BACK,"August 1st, 2004

- Previous "Wendy James" Book Club Blog Post, "The Times, They Are A Changing," April 08, 2004

- The Cambridge based R*E*P*E*A*T Fanzine (which was apparently "first set up in 1994 in homage to The Manic Street Preachers, the only band in my adult lifetime to re-unite intelligence, politics, energy, beauty and general fucked-up ness with rock'n'roll.") Revolution Baby interview with Wendy by Rosey R*E*P*E*A*T, July 21st 2004. It appears that Wendy is as keen as ever to express her views on the world:

"I think that everything is political. I think it's redundant to argue the virtues of an established political party because power corrupts absolutely. My leanings are of course towards the left, but ultimately bureaucracy is what's running the country. And greed, avarice and short sightedness. Fear is what keeps governments in power, making people scared to want to change things. I live in New York, which is fairly liberal on the whole, but for most of America it's a no brainer; Bush tells them that any minute now they're going to be under attack from dirty foreigners so no one dares to make a change. Personally I find it even more astonishing the way Tony Blair behaves as he is meant to be on the left; with Bush we knew we were getting a right wing CIA son, but Blair got in on the ticket of being for the people, it's astounding!!"

- The London News Review asks: when will Wendy come clean and admit that she's a marketing tool for Bob Dylan? July 09, 2004

- Merits of the comeback discussed by way of comments on a blog of all things...

- We are Transvision Vamp - most comprehensive unofficial site

- Racine Fan - a new fansite for Racine

- Racine - the wonderful world of Wendy James - a live journal blog

Posted by Nick @ 17:27 GMT

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Friday, August 27, 2004

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Posted by Nick @ 13:56 GMT

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Saturday, August 21, 2004

"A non-football related matter"

As featured in yesterday's FT, here's a link to the website of Chester City FC and their frank statement on why manager Mark Wright left the club on 6 August. However, friends of Mark are apparently fighting back.

Posted by Jon @ 15:22 GMT

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Friday, August 20, 2004

Follow up to the dilemma of "The Corrections" being realised on film.....

The value of literary fiction in the midst of a culture pervaded by celebrity newsbyte?

The following caught my eye whilst reading "Perchance to dream: in the age of images, a reason to write novels" - Cover Story, Harper's Magazine, April, 1996 by Jonathan Franzen

". . . . But I couldn't imagine not owning what I'd written. I would have no problem with seeing one of my novels butchered onscreen, provided I was paid, because the book itself would always belong to me. But to let another person "do creative" on an unfinished text of mine was unthinkable. Solitary work--the work of writing, the work of reading--is the essence of fiction, and what distinguishes the novel from more visual entertainments is the interior collaboration of writer and reader in building and peopling an imagined world. I'm able to know Sophie Bentwood intimately, and to refer to her as casually as if she were a good friend, because I poured my own feelings of fear and estrangement into my construction of her. If I knew her only through a video of Desperate Characters (Shirley MacLaine made the movie in 1971, as a vehicle for herself), Sophie would remain an Other, divided from me by the screen on which I viewed her, by, the ineluctable surficiality of film, and by MacLaine's star presence. At most, I might feel I knew MacLaine a little better.
Knowing MacLaine a little better, however, is what the country seems to want. We live under a tyranny of the literal. The daily unfolding stories of Steve Forbes, Magic Johnson, Timothy McVeigh, and Hillary. Clinton have an intense, iconic presence that relegates to a subordinate shadow-world our own untelevised lives. In order to justify their claim on our attention, the organs of mass culture and information are compelled to offer something "new" on a daily, indeed hourly, basis. The resulting ephemerality of every story or trend or fashion or issue is a form of planned obsolescence more impressive than a Detroit car's problems after 60,000 miles, since it generally takes a driver four or five years to reach that limit and, after all, a car actually has some use. . . ."

Posted by Nick @ 14:01 GMT

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Thursday, August 19, 2004

All is not lost!

The hardback edition of Belle's book is still available at Blackwell's, pending publication ofcourse!

Posted by Nick @ 12:44 GMT

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Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Belle de Jour: Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl

Where has The Book Club Blog's favourite book disappeared to?

The hardback edition is no longer available at Amazon. The paperback has now been listed instead, and the reviews attributed to the hardback have seemingly disappeared into the ether. I suspect more shenanigans on the part of the publishers and our beloved first time* author.

Posted by Nick @ 20:58 GMT

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Whatever happened to the movie of The Corrections?

"Billy" Elliott director Stephen Daldry targets movie adaptation of Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections"

In January 2002, the BBC reported that the same team behind the film adaptaton of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Hours" - director Stephen Daldry, playright and screenwriter David Hare, and Paramount based producer Scott Rudin (who bought the rights to film the novel with his own money in summer 2001 - before it was published, by Farrar Straus & Giroux) - were set to make US National Book Award winning novel "The Corrections" into a movie.

Mysteriously, the movie has yet to transpire and seems to have been forgotten. Does anyone out there have any idea what stage of production the project has reached?

The following is taken from a review of David Hare's screenplay for the film.
inSCRIPTions Screenplay Review: "The Corrections"

"Adapting Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections�? is an act of futility. Trying to fit its meandrous story into a few hours of cinema without an overpowering sense of loss and dissipation is like driving a car through a door and expecting it to not tear down the walls around it.
Franzen’s big, bad, ambitious novel, which reads like a family drama by Wolfe, is somewhat like the modern-day “Moby-Dick�?: you’re supposed to have read it, and if you haven’t, you lie and say you did. The book, which reveals the tale of the dysfunctional Lambert clan, is at times painfully beautiful and insightful, at times staggeringly pretentious, and manages to make the family’s story represent America in the ‘90s.
Its adaptation, by David Hare (“The Hours,�? “The Blue Room�?), a veteran screenwriter, director and playwright, is a translation by subtraction. Hare, displaying not even an ounce of understanding for the original work, melts down Franzen’s plot, hacks at large sections of it, keeps the basic spine, and presents a work as hollow, emotionless and impersonal as the book was vibrant, involving and vigorous.
The bottom line is this: as hard as it might be, as great as the work is, as much as you want to see it come to life, sometimes books should remain books. Sometimes letting a book exist as a book is the best gift you can give it. With sprawling tales rendering a time and place, and with lengths and depths unmatched by any movie, novels like “The Corrections,�? “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,�? “Freedomland,�? “The Bonfire of the Vanities,�? and “A Man in Full�? should stay as words on a page. To turn them into movies is to cripple a favorite child."

Franzen 'regrets' Oprah row, BBC, Monday, 21 January, 2002
Best-selling author Jonathan Franzen told BBC HARDtalk presenter Tim Sebastian all about success, money and why he now regrets his fight with Oprah Winfrey.

Don't look for a reason All the explanations for this war are bogus - Bush only invaded Iraq to prove that he could
David Hare, The Guardian, Saturday April 12, 2003

"Tonight in Jerusalem, next to the Garden of Gethsemane, under cover of war, while the world is not looking, Jewish fundamentalists are moving into an armed apartment block on land which belongs to the Palestinians; in the White House, Christian fundamentalists dream of moving on to murder and mayhem in countries beyond count; and on the stony hillsides of Pakistan and Afghanistan, Muslim fundamentalists dream of moving on to murder and mayhem in countries beyond count. The trade union of international politicians exercises an ever more Stalinist grip, moving countries and armies to wars they do not want. Only the people say no."

Salon Brilliant Careers: David Hare - 1999 article examining how the dramatist has reinvigorated theater with plays that are both compelling and successful.

Posted by Nick @ 13:58 GMT

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Thursday, August 12, 2004

Unpublished Larkin Poem 'Written in Grotty Bedsit'

'And Yet' was written in 1948 while Larkin was working as a librarian at the University of Leicester. Apparently he and Kingsley Amis trooped down to the senior common room at Leicester University where Amis sees this scene of odd people and his very words are: ’Christ, I’ve got to do something about this’. He went away and wrote Lucky Jim. Jim was originally Larkin.

Now that's odd because I always imagined that Jim was Amis!

Posted by Nick @ 20:59 GMT

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