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Saturday, February 26, 2005

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville is the Book Club's newly chosen book

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Posted by Nick @ 09:09 GMT

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Thursday, February 24, 2005

The Independent considers Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood essential reading for British school children

What books should our children read? The Independent, 24 February 2005.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) has decided to launch a public debate on what classroom English in the 21st century should be.

Sue Horner, head of English at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA):
"We thought that rather than just tinker with it we would think hard about it, and how it will look in the future. We don't have a view. We are saying: 'What do you think about this, then?' It is a completely new way for us to work."

In response, The Independent proposes a cannon of 20 authors deemed essential school reading. The only one of whom to have featured as the author of one of our chosen Book Club Books is Murakami. And he certainly wasn't on the curriculum when I was at school.

Shakespeare: King Lear / Romeo and Juliet
John Donne
The Romantic poets: Keats/Coleridge/ Wordsworth
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
Anton Chekhov: Short stories
TS Eliot
F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Virginia Woolf: To The Lighthouse
George Orwell: Animal Farm
Alan Paton: Cry, the Beloved Country
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
Primo Levi: If This Is a Man
William Golding: Lord of the Flies
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
VS Naipaul: A House for Mr Biswas
Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children (1980)
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
Haruki Murakami: Norwegian Wood (1987)

Posted by Nick @ 08:30 GMT

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Monday, February 21, 2005

Hunter S Thompson RIP

Hunter S. Thompson has shot himself dead at 67. Guardian Times Scotsman New York Times Times obituary
- The Great Thompson Hunt
- YOUNG DOCTOR THOMPSON, Esquire article, Excerpt from Hunter, The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson, by E. Jean Carroll

Literary Kicks: "Hunter S. Thompson, who carried the beat romanticism of Jack Kerouac, the political conviction of Allen Ginsberg and the acidic skepticism of William S. Burroughs into the world of popular journalism, died a Hemingway-esque death in Colorado on February 20, 2005."

- Guardian - Newsblog: A product of his own chutzpah: "According to his Wikipedia entry, Thompson "is generally regarded as the grandfather of the blogging movement" - a statement that's news to me but which, presumably, refers to blogs' tendency to place the author and his prejudices at the heart of the narrative, just as he did, rather than to any propensity on the part of bloggers to consume vast amounts of narcotics."
- Daily Kos's clarifies idea of HST as inspiration for bloggers
"Thompson was known for a style that he described as "gonzo journalism," a form of "new journalism." It was based on the idea that fidelity to fact did not always blaze the way to truth.
Instead, "gonzo journalism" and its practitioners suggested that a deeper truth could be found in the ambiguous zones between fact and fiction.
"Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long," Thompson told interviewers in a characteristic pronouncement on both institutions.
"You can't be objective about Nixon," he said. "How can you be objective about Clinton?"Hunter S. Thompson -- the world's first blogger."

*I suppose that makes you know who's Belle de Jour a work of pure gonzo.
**A book buyers guide to purchasing a work of gonzo non-fiction. THE SEARCH FOR HUNTER S. THOMPSON, S.E. Munday 1998.

- Blogcritics.org review of Hunter S. Thompson's Hey Rube : Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk

"The essays in Hey Rube are collected from his weekly column for ESPN Magazine over the last three years. They're very short essays, usually 300-500 words, and they're ostensibly about sports. In actuality they're about whatever Thomspon felt like writing about at the time, and basically weave together three threads of narrative, his personal life, his political observations, and his opinions on various aspects of sport.
Thompson had his start in journalism as a sports writer before he diverged into mostly politics and surrealistic personal narrative. To some degree these essays take him back to his roots, but heavily filtered through his gonzo style where everything is grist for his mill."

- ESPN Hunter S. Thompson Hey Rube Archive
- From Hunter S. Thompson's Hey Rube column "Jack Kerouac and the Football Hall of Fame"
"It was midnight on Sunday when my telephone rang. My nerves were raw, and my eyes were swollen from an overdose of pure Ozone, which had blinded me many hours earlier when I tampered with input-jets at the swimming pool.
But the phone kept ringing, and I recognized the singular voice of my friend James Irsay, who was calling to tell me not to worry about his star running back, Edgerrin James, not showing up for the Indianapolis Colts' summer football camp.
"It's nothing to worry about, Hunter," said Irsay, who owns the Colts and a few other things -- including the original scroll/manuscript of Jack Kerouac's legendary "Beat Generation" novel, On The Road. ... I had called him to check out some rumors about the "mysterious disappearance" of his 22-year-old NFL rushing champ, who is crucial to the Colts' Super Bowl plans for 2002(....)

Maybe I will wear a blue and white No. 32 jersey when football season rolls around this year. It will make me feel happy and confident.

Indeed. But that is another long story that we don't have time for now.
... Maybe later, when we talk about Jack Kerouac again. He was a football star, in his youth, just like me.
Some things never change, eh?
But time flies, and I am going blind again, from that evil Ozone water -- or maybe it's just the daylight. ... Of course! All Vampires go blind when the sun comes up.
So why worry? Everybody needs a few hours of good sleep now and then. And tonight I will be able to see everything that moves, from here to as far as the Crow flies. Ho ho. "

Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005)
"America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

Posted by Nick @ 10:55 GMT

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On me 'ead son - Beckhams have accidentally given their new son a surname as his first name

BBC - "Cruz is a common surname in Spain and South America, but is an unusual first name, according to Lola Oria, Spanish language tutor at Oxford University.
She said Cruz is actually an old-fashioned girl's name, adding: "It is quite a strange thing to do to a little boy.""

Posted by Nick @ 09:34 GMT

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Sunday, February 20, 2005

What's happening in the British blogosphere?

Tim Worstall "It's All Obvious or Trivial Except..." has compiled his first BritBlog Roundup to try to find out.

Posted by Nick @ 23:07 GMT

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Pseudonymous Escort In White House Journalist Scandal? You couldn't make it up, but I had considered the possibility.

James Guckert/Jeff Gannon: "I use a pseudonym because my real name is very difficult to pronounce, to remember and to spell."
CNN's Anderson Cooper: "How is James so much harder than Jeff."
(Video)

What was Iain Duncan Smith saying yesterday about the power of blogging to "ignite many new forces of conservatism"? Today's papers are awash with reports of the gay prostitution scandal hitting the Bush White House. Just how do you get a White House press pass with an alias?

- White House's loyal reporter once worked as gay hooker, By Andrew Buncombe in Washington, 20 February 2005 The Independent.
"Such an unlikely possibility emerged this week after a right-wing reporter who used an alias to obtain a White House press pass was revealed to possess something of a saucy past. Bloggers revealed that Jeff Gannon, real name James Guckert, had previously worked as a $200-an-hour gay prostitute who advertised himself on a series of websites with names such as hotmilitary stud.com. Mr Guckert has resigned from his job as a reporter for the conservative online news site Talon News, owned by a Texas Republican."
"On one now notorious occasion, Mr Guckert, 32, asked Mr Bush how he was going to be able to work with the Democrats leadership which "appear to have divorced them- selves from reality."
"...some are speculating that Mr Guckert's previous incarnation may have been what secured him preferential treatment from one or more officials within the White House. "

- The mole, the US media and a White House coup - The reporter who wasn't is part of a wider press scandal, writes Paul Harris in New York Sunday February 20, 2005 The Observer
"But the Gannon affair, which has shocked much of America's political establishment, is just the latest scandal in the media establishment. Newspapers including the New York Times and USA Today have been hit by plagiarism and forgery scandals."
"On the internet, the mainstream media is derided and scorned. One question is dominating US newsrooms and television studios: ignored, scandalised and now corrupted, just what is America's mainstream media for anymore? "
"If, during the Clinton administration, a fake reporter from a Democrat front organisation, using a false name, had been exposed as attending White House press conferences it would have been a national scandal. If he had then been shown to be a gay prostitute, the scandal could have threatened a Democrat presidency. With 'Gannon' and Bush there has been no such outcry. The mainstream media has approached the story warily, while right-wing organisations such as Fox News have largely ignored it.
That has created a vacuum in the US media. It is a space being filled by 'bloggers' from both left and right who write personal journals, or weblogs, on the internet."
"Unlike Britain, where political blogs are barely part of the debate, internet sites in America are seen as a vital political tool."
"Conservative bloggers have taken two big scalps recently (Rather/Eason) ....The left has also had victories. It was not the mainstream media that exposed Gannon, but left-wing website Media Matters for America which enlisted other liberal bloggers to help. All the significant breaks in the story emerged online, forcing Gannon to resign, reveal his real name and go into hiding. "
"Some commentators see the emergence of blogging as a media force as a liberating phenomenon. Unlike the mainstream media, blogging is cheap, easy and open to anyone regardless of qualification or background or money."
"Others see it as part of the trend towards partisan journalism. Spearheaded by the nakedly right-wing Fox News, journalism in America has come to resemble a political shouting match rather than any form of debate of the issues."
"The media is in the midst of a transformation which the Bush administration is keen to foster. They have discovered that a partisan and atomised media can be controlled, manipulated and used to an unprecedented degree. "
"The old-fashioned mainstream media is disappearing. 'Once that pattern is put in place, it is going to be hard to break,' said Jack Lule, a journalism professor at Lehigh University. "

All very bizarre. Particularly since, when the presidential inauguration recently overshadowed the coinciding Belle de Jour book launch party, amidst fresh Deepthroat speculation, I wondered whether:
"...What the world needs is a fresh sexual imbroglio at the WhiteHouse to offset the imminent armageddon. Maybe the Guardian newsblog should recruit Belle to go undercover as an intern or somesuch and bring George down. Now that would make a good blog/book. It might even out-do the last anonymous person to precipitate an impeachment scandal and maybe even shift a few papers. I wonder if Belle's anonymity could remain in tact for as long as Deep Throat's."
Extract from an email (Fri, 21 Jan 2005 14:11:38)

Daily Kos is obviously covering developments:
"Why isn't every major network in the country investigating a security breach, forget anything else. How could the FBI, for 17 years I was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the ranking member. I've read more FBI reports than I ever wanted to know. How could that happen and no one had any idea who this guy was?... The Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate should be investigating it. The House Judiciary should be investigating it. And if it were the other party in charge, it would be investigated." Senator Joe Biden (D-DE)
- What Is GannonGuckert's Next Move?
- Sex, Lies & The White House Press Office - Part I (BlogCritics)
- Sex, Lies & the White House Press Office - Part II (BlogCritics)
- Gannon Speaks (BlogCritics)
"Why would they be looking into a person's sexual history? Is that what we're going to do to reporters now? Is there some kind of litmus test for reporters? Is it right to hold someone's sexuality against them?"

Hear Joe Biden on Bill Maher's HBO show discussing Jeff Gannon and the Bush Mandate with Robin Williams and Leslie Stahl (Video)
- Real Time with Bill Maher
- CNN Jeff Gannon - A questioner questioned (Video) (via corked bats)

- Jeff Gannon (aka James Dale Guckert) Wikipedia
- Bloggers get their claws into Talon Sunday February 13, 2005 The Observer

Posted by Nick @ 08:30 GMT

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Thursday, February 17, 2005

GOD IS NOWHERE. GOD IS NOW HERE. Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland

- Coupland.com - Douglas Coupland's Official Site

- The Coupland File : The site about Douglas Coupland
- Douglas_Coupland - Wikipedia
- The Morning News - Robert Birnbaum v. Douglas Coupland, September 2003
DC: "As there are more and more people on the planet and information becomes more transparent and more pervasive, the tokens of authenticity that we look for become ever smaller…"
- Douglas Coupland (1961- ) The Guardian
"Did you know? He refuses to own furniture and is an avid meteorite collector."
- The Bogus Tribute Blog to Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland in conversation with Naomi Klein, Black Book (Winter 2004) PART 1, Part 2.
DC: "The only tenable viewpoints of the present I've been able to find come from Eric Hobsbawm, a British intellectual who wrote extensively from Marxist stance. While my background is utterly nondoctrinaire, I have noted that once Marxism became a historical novelty, it oddly became genuinely relevant. Marxism is a structured ideology based on the creation of wealth, the nature of "ownership," and the links of wealth to collective social welfare. It remains eerily precise in decodifying the shifting matrices of capital that define our era. This, in spite of 1989, September 11, 2001, and, as this is a fashion magazine, the intractability of acid-wash denim on the former East German style consciousness."
- From Fear To Eternity, Spike Magazine, Chris Mitchell emails Douglas Coupland about fame, the future and the problem with American chocolate.
"your 20s are muck and shit and painand loneliness and horror"
"the only decisions that matter are those madein the face of eternity"
- All the lonely people - Artist and Generation X novelist Douglas Coupland talks about disaster movies, Google, and his new book, Eleanor Rigby. (Outtakes from an interview that appears in the February 1, 2005, issue of The Advocate)
DC: "As of last month I began doing this body of work which is explicitly about books. The Hornet’s Nests, for example. Which is literally...I’m addicted to Law & Order. But I feel guilty just sitting there doing nothing. Curse you, Dick Wolf! And so I thought, Well, I might as well chew up pages while I’m watching TV. So I chew them up and then weave them together to make these nests. That’s about cellulose. That’s about taking a book out of cultural time and putting it into Darwinian or archaeological time. That becomes about the way that cultural information is passed forward or isn’t passed forward. "
DC: "Someone told me once that irony is like country-and-western music, that only 20% of the population actually gets irony. Which means there’s 80% of the population out there who are taking everything at face value. I mean, I have a hunch you understand irony quite well. But I can imagine if you had to take the world at face value, and you had no safety valve of irony to help you reconcile opposites that coexist, you’d go nuts. I think ironic and unironic can coexist; I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive."
- Reality Bites (1994):
Lelaina: Can you define "irony"?
Troy Dyer: It's when the actual meaning is the complete opposite from the literal meaning.
- IMDB Generation X

Posted by Nick @ 17:38 GMT

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A previously published article resurfaces in The Chicago Tribune

An idea whose time has come: A new forum (blogging) inspires old (books), By Joshua Kurlantzick, New York Times News Service, Published February 17, 2005
- Also Blogosphere dispatches - BeachNotes, Wednesday, February 09, 2005
- Book In You, Daniel Radosh, The New Yorker, 2004-05-24.

Posted by Nick @ 12:37 GMT

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Saturday, February 12, 2005

We are not alone!

Why the book club is more than a fad, Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent, Saturday February 12, 2005, The Guardian

It is a phenomenon that has become a near ubiquitous part of bourgeois life - and it is about far more than just reading.

"The hummus and camembert having been consumed, the book club is ready to begin.
In a dining room in Hackney, east London, is gathered a group of three men and five women in their 30s and 40s. Among them are a headteacher, a gardener, a fitness trainer and a writer. They have been meeting in each others' homes to talk books since 2001; soon they will tackle their 50th.
This month it is an airport page-turner - Kathy Reichs's Death Du Jour. Last time it was Catcher in the Rye, the month before, a Gore Vidal....."

"The discourse at reading groups does not often have much in common with the language of scholarship. Prof Currie and a fellow English literature don were once barred from a book club lest they ruin the fun with talk of structuralism and the like.
For others, that expulsion might represent a happy revolution. According to Professor John Sutherland, of London University: "People are reclaiming the right to read from pointy-headed academics".
Reading groups have been around for a long time. But there is clearly something about our current social and cultural circumstances that has made this book club explosion happen now."

- Start Your Own Slutty Book Group, SlutLessons, BookSlut

Posted by Nick @ 20:10 GMT

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Friday, February 11, 2005

Arthur Miller - Death of a playwright, passing of a legend

"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets." Arthur Miller

"I understand Willy Loman's longing for immortality Willy's writing his name in a cake of ice on a hot day, but he wishes he were writing in stone." Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller, one of the great figures of 20th-century theatre, has died of heart failure after a battle against cancer, pneumonia and a heart condition.
The 89-year-old writer of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible had been in hospice care at his sister's apartment in New York since his release from hospital last month.
However, at his request he was taken by ambulance earlier this week to his main home - an 18th-century farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, which he bought in 1958 while he was married to Marilyn Monroe.

- Remembrances of Arthur Miller from the Los Angeles Times, The Times, the Associated Press, the BBC (and its readers), Salon, the Chicago Tribune and USA Today. Charles Isherwood and Harold Pinter write tributes to Miller. (via bookslut)
- The Arthur Miller Society

Posted by Nick @ 15:05 GMT

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Saturday, February 05, 2005

Diary of a literary blogger

Jessa Crispin, the Chicago based blogger behind Bookslut, has kept a diary of her week for the Guardian, which picks out its top 10 literary blogs. (via. Literary Saloon)

Posted by Nick @ 09:35 GMT

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Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Sideways encouragement for unpublished authors

Miles: I'm not a writer. I'm an 8th grade English teacher. I'm so insignificant I can't even kill myself.
Jack: What do you mean?
Miles: Woolf. Hemingway. Plath. You can't kill yourself before you're published.
Jack: What about that guy who wrote A Confederacy of Dunces? He killed himself before he was published.
Miles: Thanks.

- Taste of success, author Rex Pickett talks about his semi-autobiographical novel, Guardian, 1 Feruary, 2005
- 'Sideways' Author Rex Pickett, NPR audio interview, Fresh Air from WHYY, November 15, 2004. Towards the end of the interview Pickett reflects that the movie's success has changed his life in as much as there is now the distraction of typing "Rex Pickett," "Sideways" and "Alexander Payne" into the internet and reading all the great things that have been written about the film.

- Sideways official site

- The Phoenix is showing Sideways until 10 Feruary, 2005

- The Londonist considers the UK press reviews of Sideways, 28 January, 2005
- Sideways glances - the Santa Barbara landscape behind the Golden Globe winner, Saturday January 29, 2005
- Sideways, Roger Ebert's review, October 29, 2004
- Critics are fighting it out:It's 'Baby' vs. 'Sideways,' Roger Ebert, January 12, 2005
- Oscars

Posted by Nick @ 08:32 GMT

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