Friday, August 31, 2012

My hero / Roald Dahl by Michael Rosen




Roald Dahl: my hero
BIOGRAPHY
'He was one of the first writers who can be read and enjoyed by children to show us adults in familiar, everyday situations failing spectacularly, grotesquely and exaggeratedly in this job of nurture'



Michael Rosen

Friday 31 August 2012 22.44 BST


I was teaching an MA seminar on children's literature when a rather severe Latvian student dived into a discussion about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by stating: "Roald Dahl – no literary merit whatsoever." Immediately, a young London primary school teacher retorted with stories of how the children in her class, many of whom wouldn't read of their own accord, loved Dahl's books, roaring with laughter and amazement as she read them out loud. The Latvian woman didn't change her expression at all, and repeated: "Roald Dahl – no literary merit whatsoever."
I'm too old to have read him as a child, so my encounters with both his life and his work have been as a parent. I'm of the view that what we call children's books are interventions in society's debate about bringing up children, and Dahl entered this debate through literature with passion and commitment. The result was that he was one of the first writers who can be read and enjoyed by children to show us adults in familiar, everyday situations failing spectacularly, grotesquely and exaggeratedly in this job of nurture.
Dahl knew what he was doing, remarking that we both love and hate our parents, even if we don't admit it to ourselves. He also knew that to engage the child in this conflict, the child had to care deeply about the fate of the children in the book. He achieved this through a series of tricks and schemes that surprise, horrify and disgust us.
Dahl's own life was in one sense privileged, but in another beset with cruelty, tragedy and pain. He responded to these challenges with astounding ingenuity and heroism, mingled with gruffness and fun. As an alternative to weeping, his books and his life offer me, for one, the example of a crazy, hyperbolic route through.


THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016



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Elizabeth Hand / Hungerford Bridge

Elizabeth Hand
Hungerford Bridge
by Elizabeth Hand

CONJUNCTIONS:52, Spring 2009

  I HADN’T HEARD FROM Miles for several months when he wrote to ask if I wanted to get together for lunch. Of course I did, and several days later I met him at a noisy, cheerful restaurant at South Bank. It was early February, London still somewhat dazed by the heavy snowfall that had recently paralyzed the city. The Thames seemed a river of lead; a black skim of ice made the sidewalks treacherous—I’d seen another man fall as I’d walked from Waterloo Station—and I wished I’d worn something warmer than the old wool greatcoat I’d had since college.
     But once settled into the seat across from Miles, all that fell away.
     “You’re looking well, Robbie,” he said, smiling.
     “You too.”
  
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Life and style / Tom Jones / The scent of a woman

Tom Jones
LIFE AND STYLE

Q&A: Tom Jones


'My fancy dress costume of choice? Dick Turpin'
Interview: Rosanna Greenstreet
Friday 31 August 2012 22.59 BST
Tom Jones was born Thomas Jones Woodward in south Wales in 1940. He left school at 16 and married his wife Linda a year later, just before the birth of their son Mark. In 1963, he joined his first band and two years later his career took off with It's Not Unusual, his first hit in the UK and US. He went on to have success with the classics Green, Green Grass Of Home and Delilah. He has sold more than 100m records. He was one of the coaches on the TV talent show The Voice. His latest album is Spirit In The Room and next week he releases the single (I Want To) Come Home. Tomorrow he performs at Radio 2 Live In Hyde Park.
When were you happiest?
When I was able finally to get out of bed when I had TB – after two years.
What is your greatest fear? 
Being locked up in jail.
What is your earliest memory?
I can see the kitchen in the house where I was born – so think I was in a high-chair having some nosh.
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
The Queen, for her loyalty and determination.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Bad sense of time – on the clock, not in music!
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Bullying.
What has been your most embarrassing moment?
I was in the toilet somewhere on the M1, sitting with my trousers down, and some girls jumped over the door.
What is your most treasured possession?
My voice.
What would your super power be?
Immortality.
What makes you unhappy?
Not being able to sing.
What is your favourite smell?
The scent of a woman.
What is your favourite book?
The Rise And Fall Of The British Empire, by Lawrence James.
What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?
Dick Turpin.
What is the worst thing anyone's said to you?
"I heard you were paid off." Early in my career there was a rumour that I was paidnot to play at some club – which was not true. It still rankles.
Cat or dog?
Dog.
Is it better to give or to receive?
By giving you receive – it's a good deal.
Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?
Winston Churchill, both of my grandfathers – whom I've never met – John Wayne and Boudicca.
Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
Any and many swearwords.
What is the worst job you've done?
Twelve-hour shifts in a paper mill.
When did you last cry, and why?
When I listened to one of my [The Voice] team members sing.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Being knighted by Her Majesty.
What keeps you awake at night?
Knowing I have to get up early.
What song would you like played at your funeral?
I haven't given it any thought.
How would you like to be remembered?
As a helluva singer.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Don't make decisions when you've had too much to drink.
Where would you most like to be right now?
Wherever I am, breathing and well.



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Thursday, August 30, 2012

Paul Bowles and Master Musicians of Jajouka


Photographer, manager and producer Cherie Nutting talks about Paul Bowles, and Master Musicians of Jajouka

“The image stops time. It is the first primordial thought. We are here. Music is pre - image...It’s vibrations form both the image and all parallel realities...”
Cherie Nutting:  Moroccan perfume of desert
Cherie Nutting was born under the Taurus sign in Massachusetts, USA. She is a photographer and musical artist manager, known for her photographs of expatriate author and composer Paul Bowles. Bowles and Nutting collaborated on the book "Yesterday’s Perfume: An Intimate Memoir of Paul Bowles" (2000). The book, an impressionistic collage of many of Nutting's photographs and reminiscences of her close 13-year friendship with Bowles, and which also includes some of Bowles' journal entries, new essays and previously unpublished writings.

















She studied photography at the New England School of Photography and at the New York School of Visual Arts. In February 1989, Nutting married the Moroccan musician Bachir Attar, and she became manager for both the Master Musicians of Jajouka Featuring Bachir Attar. Nutting also helped to arrange logistics and Tangier location for the June 1989 recording sessions of the 'Master Musicians of Jajouka Featuring Bachir Attar', and the Rolling Stones, for the song "Continental Drift" on the Stones' Steel Wheels album.

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Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Paul Bowles / Interview / David Seidner

Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles
BOMB 4/Fall 1982

The productive climate throughout Europe from about 1900 on, was based, more or less, on the promise of a new world that industry would provide. The political movements, and ensuing wars and revolutions, served both to destroy and calcify idealism in the arts. As we approach the 21st century, we can clearly see that our hopes have been dashed; we grope blindly for a new set of ideals upon which to base a new ideology. Our links to this glorious past are quickly disappearing. All us youngsters (anyone under 50), can only dream of Paris in the twenties, the luxury of sea travel, stately old hotels in undiscovered corners of paradise, and the efficient hush of servants. In a country where underwear is still ironed, and villages spring up overnight, Paul Bowles, one of those links to the past, has chosen to make his home. Despite television, one still has the sense of being isolated in Morocco.
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Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Paul Bowles / The Art of Fiction


Paul Bowles

BIOGRAPHY 

The Art of Fiction No. 67

THE PARIS REVIEW No. 81
Fall 1981
Interviewed by Jeffrey Bailey
 The Tangier that once greeted Bowles in 1931, promising “wisdom and ecstasy,” bears little resemblance to the Tangier of the 1970s. The frenetic medina, with its souks, its endless array of tourist boutiques, its perennial hawkers and hustlers is still there, of course, though fifty years ago it had already been dwarfed by the European city and its monuments to colonialism: the imperious French Consulate, the Café de Paris, luxury hotels in the grand style (the Minzah, the Velasquez, the Villa de France), the now forlornly abandoned Teatro Cervantes, and the English church with its cemetery filled with the remains of knight commanders, baronets, and the prodigal sons of former empires. The days of Tangier as the wide-open international city of intrigue are gone forever. Today it is simply one city of a third-world country in flux, slowly but steadily coming to grips with the twentieth century.
For those of a romantic bent, however, the power of Tangier to evoke images of the inscrutable East remains potent, despite the ravages of modernity. It still seems an appropriate place to find Paul Bowles. Any American who comes to Tangier bearing more than a casual curiosity about Morocco and a vague concern for music and literature considers a visit with Bowles an absolute must; for some, it even assumes the reverential character of a pilgrimage. In no way, however, does Bowles see himself as an object of special interest. Indeed, such an attitude strikes him as being amusingly naive, if not downright silly.
He lives in a three-room apartment in a quiet residential section of Tangier. His flat, located in a fifties-futuristic building in sight of the American consulate, is comfortably unimposing, though it does testify to his days as a world traveler: souvenirs from Asia, Mexico, black Africa; a bookcase lined with personally inscribed volumes by Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Vidal; an entryway in which vintage trunks and suitcases are stacked shoulder high, as if a voyage of indefinite length were perpetually in the offing.
Our first meeting took place in the summer of 1976. I arrived at his door in the early afternoon. I found him newly awakened, his thick white hair tousled and pale blue eyes slightly bleary; he was obviously surprised that anyone would come to call at that hour of the day. As he finished his breakfast and lighted up his first cigarette, his thin, somewhat wiry frame relaxed noticeably. He became increasingly jovial.
Evidently, however, my timing hadn’t been particularly good. The tape recorder had just begun to roll when a series of visitors announced themselves with persistent rings of the doorbell: his chauffeur, his maid, a woman friend from New York, an American boy who’d taken the apartment downstairs, and, eventually, Mohammed Mrabet. Handsome in a rugged and brooding way, Mrabet asked me to bring him, on my return to Tangier, a pistol with nine chambers as there were apparently nine people upon whose elimination he was intent at that time.
As it turned out, I had reason to be grateful for his and the other interruptions. They enabled me to return and talk at length with Bowles that evening, the next day, and two more times over the following year and a half.

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Monday, August 27, 2012

Fashion names make list of 100 most powerful women



Gisele Bundchen - gisele-bundchen Wallpaper

Fashion names make list of 100 most powerful women

Anna Wintour, Diane von Furstenberg, Gisele Bundchen, Miuccia Prada and Angela Ahrendts have all won places on Forbes' latest list of the 100 most powerful women in the world.
The Telegraph
BY BIBBY SOWRAY | 23 AUGUST 2012

Miuccia Prada, Diane von Furstenberg and Anna Wintour, Gisele Bundchen Photo: Rex/Getty
Designers Diane von Furstenberg and Miuccia Prada, American Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts and Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen, all appear on the list , which is topped by German chancellor Angela Merkel 
Surprisingly, Diane von Furstenberg beats Wintour to achieve the highest ranking of the four women, appearing at number 33. The publication cites the 65-year-old Belgian designer's fourth term as president of the CFDA, and her upcoming collaborations with Roxy and Evian, as well as her second marriage to media mogul and billionaire philanthropist Barry Diller (who is ranked 804th on Forbes' Billionaires List) as reasons for her positioning.
Wintour, who has edited the US edition of Vogue since 1988, is positioned 51st owing mainly to her increasing political prowess. According to a list published by the US President's re-election campaign organisers earlier this year, Wintour has raised more than $500,000 (£315,600) through various fund-raising events including a 2010 dinner at her private residence in New York's Sullivan Street attended by fashion luminaries Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, and Diane von Furstenberg; and a dinner co-hosted by film mogul Harvey Weinstein in 2011 for which tickets cost $71,600 (£45,000) per couple. Forbes also makes reference to the opening of US Vogue's revenue-making digital archives in 2011.
Miuccia Prada takes the 67th spot on the list thanks to the $13 billion value of her fashion empire, of which she controls 33.2% of the shares and includes both Prada and sister label Miu Miu. The company was floated on the Hong Kong Stock Exchangein 2011 .
Brazilian supermodel Gisele, who is currently pregnant with her second child , comes in 83rd, but she's noted not just for her wealth - she is still the world's highest-earning model - but also for her philanthropic deeds. She is credited with planting over 50,000 trees in her native Brazil this year through her work as an ambassador for the U.N. Environmental Program, she has donated $1 million to the Japanese Red Cross for Earthquake relief and she has recently launched a model search in Brazil's most impoverished areas in an initiative which aims to boost the self esteem of Brazil's slum dwellers.
Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts also features on the list, at number 45. The 52-year-old mother of three is credited with "infusing the classic clothier with Silicon Valley tech savvy". Other famous faces who appear on the list include Lady Gaga (#14), Beyonce Knowles (#32) and Angelina Jolie (#66).




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