Saturday, May 31, 2014

Maya Angelou / I'm fine as wine in the summertime

Maya Angelou
BIOGRAPHY

'I'm fine as wine in the summertime'

She's 81 and growing frail, but revered author and poet Maya Angelou has lost none of her legendary wisdom and humour. In a rare interview, she explains why she's not about to retire

By Gary Younge
The Guardian, Saturday 14 November 2009

Maya Angelou: 'I plan to keep working as long as I can.' Photograph: Chris Buck

During a trip to Senegal, Maya Angelou called Samia, a friend she had made in Paris several years before, and was invited over for dinner. Passing a room where people apparently clung to the wall to avoid standing on the rug, Angelou became incensed. "I had known a woman in Egypt who would not allow her servants to walk on her rugs, saying that only she, her family and friends were going to wear out her expensive carpets. Samia plummeted in my estimation."

Keen to challenge her host's hauteur, she walked back and forth across the carpet. "The guests who were bunched up on the sidelines smiled at me weakly." Soon afterwards, servants came, rolled up the rug, took it away and brought in a fresh one. Samia then came in and announced that they would be serving one of Senegal's most popular dishes in honour of Angelou: "Yassah, for our sister from America… Shall we sit?" And as the guests went to the floor where glasses, plates, cutlery and napkins were laid out on the carpet, Angelou realised the full extent of her faux pas and was "on fire with shame".

"Clever and so proper Maya Angelou, I had walked up and down over the tablecloth… In an unfamiliar culture, it is wise to offer no innovations, no suggestions, or lessons. The epitome of sophistication is utter simplicity." Such is an example of the 28 short epistles that comprise Letter To My Daughter, Angelou's latest book.

Maya Angelou / Quotes I

QUOTES I

by Maya Angelou
BIOGRAPHY

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived; however, if faced with courage, need not be lived again."

"Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning."

"Someone was hurt before you, beaten before you, humiliated before you, raped before you; yet someone survived."

"I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver."

"Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style."

"The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry."

"Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns all clean."

"Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable."

"If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded."

"Alone, all alone

Nobody, but nobody

Can make it out here alone."

"We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders."

"Human beings are more alike than unalike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere, yet I encourage travel to as many destinations as possible for the sake of education as well as pleasure."

"Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: "I'm with you kid. Let's go.""

"If you don't like somehting, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain."

"Nothing will work unless you do."

"You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it."

"Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it."

"Being a woman is hard work."

"Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway."

"I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass."

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."

"Living a life is like constructing a building: if you start wrong, you'll end wrong."

"The horizon leans forward, offering you space to place new steps of change."

"The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach."

"One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest."

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

"No one wants to travel the dark road of pain alone. We all look to those who went before us for inspiration and hope."

Maya Angelou / No surrender

Maya Angelou
BIOGRAPHY

No surrender

Maya Angelou, poet, epigrammist and philosopher, has completed the final part of her autobiography - it covers the darkest hours of the civil rights movement. For someone in the inspiration and uplift business, it was a hard task. But she managed, as she always does

by Gary Younge
The Guardian, Saturday 25 May 2002

Maya Angelou does not like to fly. So she made it to the West Coast from her home in North Carolina by bus. It is 2,152 miles as the crow flies. But she more than trebled the distance, coming via Toronto and the Rockies, on her five-week book and lecture tour. It's not a Greyhound, she quickly explains, but a serious tour bus, complete with a double bed, spare rooms, shower, cooking facilities and satellite television.

The first one she had, which she rented from Prince, had a washer-dryer, too. She herself designed the interior for the next one, which will be delivered before the end of the year. It will be decked out in kente cloth - the hand-woven fabric of Ghana's Ashanti region that has become an aesthetic signifier of black America's African heritage. In the thousands of miles that they have travelled around the country in this bus, she has bumped into Lauryn Hill and passed BB King.

Angelou gave up flying, unless it is really vital, about three years ago. Not because she was afraid, but because she was fed up with the hassle of celebrity. One of the last times she flew, her feet had not made it to the kerbside at the airport before an excitable woman started shouting her name. "It's Maya Angelou, Maya Angelou," she screamed incessantly.

My hero / Maya Angelou by her publisher Lennie Goodings

My hero: Maya Angelou by her publisher Lennie Goodings

The late author's UK editor remembers a funny, gracious, kind, demanding, delightful and wise human being – and writer of one of the world's great autobiographies

BIOGRAPHY

by Lenni Goodings
The Guardian, Thursday 29 May 2014

Maya Angelou and Lennie Goodings at Maya's 70th birthday party

Maya Angelou was one of the world's most important writers and activists. She lived and chronicled an extraordinary life: rising from poverty, violence and racism, she became a renowned author, poet, playwright, civil rights' activist – working with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King – and memoirist. She wrote and performed a poem, "On the Pulse of Morning", for President Clinton on his inauguration; she was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama and was honoured by more than 70 universities throughout the world.

Maya Angelou, 1957

Maya Angelou: American titan who lived as though there were no tomorrow

BIOGRAPHY

America has not just lost a talented Renaissance woman and a gifted raconteur– it has lost a connection to its recent past

by Gary Younge in Chicago

The Guardian, Wednesday 28 2014

The first time I interviewed Maya Angelou, in 2002, I got hammered. What was supposed to have been a 45-minute interview in a hotel room near Los Angeles had turned into a 16-hour day, much of it spent in her stretch limo, during which we'd been to lunch, and she had performed. On the way back from Pasadena she asked her assistant, Lydia Stuckey, to get out the whisky.

“Do you want ice and stuff?” Stuckey asked.

“I want some ice, but mostly I want stuff,” said Angelou with a smile, and invited me to join her.

Patricia Lockwood / The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas

Credit...
Mark Peckmezian for The New York Times

The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas

By Jesse Lichtenstein
May 28, 2014

Just before she took the microphone one soggy night in Portland, Ore., the poet Patricia Lockwood downed a shot of cheap bourbon. She had never had a drink right before a reading, but she often enacts some private joke when she speaks in public. It might be slurping her water loudly into the microphone, or rolling (instead of stepping) onto a stage, or, in this case, ingesting something that tasted to her like a puddle in a forest — anything to erase what she calls the “anxiety kegels” leading up to a performance.

That evening, more than a hundred poetry fans — most of them in their 20s, most of them clutching cans of bargain beer — crowded into a corner of a 12,000-square-foot wood-and-metal shop as Lockwood began a 12-minute romp of a poem called “The Father and Mother of American Tit-Pics.”

Lockwood is all large eyes, apple cheeks and pixie haircut — like an early Disney creation, perhaps a woodland creature; one of her fans recently rendered her as a My Little Pony. The contrast between how she presents and what she writes is something Lockwood delights in.

“Emily Dickinson was the father of American poetry and Walt Whitman was the mother,” she read. “Walt Whitman nude, in the forest, staring deep into a still pool — the only means of taking tit-pics available at that time.”

I laughed, like everyone else in the audience, and then settled in for a poem that re-envisioned two 19th-century pillars of American poetry through a kaleidoscope of contemporary obsessions. Occasionally, the sound of arc welding filled the silences between stanzas. It was, she later said, “the butchest I have ever felt.”

Not long before this performance, a friend of mine introduced me to Lockwood’s work, handing me a copy of her first book, “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black,” which his small poetry press had just published. Large portions of it are meditations on the cartoon character Popeye. It would seem an unlikely candidate for a New Yorker critic’s end-of-the-year picks, yet it was, and it also became the best-selling small-press poetry book of 2013 (by a living poet), marking Lockwood as indie-poetry royalty. This week, her second collection of poems, “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,” comes out from Penguin, and in April, Lockwood announced the sale of her memoir to Riverhead.

Most poets who publish with the top indie or trade publishers in the country teach at universities, and nearly all have taken advanced degrees — an M.F.A. or even a Ph.D. in creative writing. The effect of grad-school workshops on literature in the United States has been the subject of endless debate — the M.F.A. vs. N.Y.C. meme being the most recent variation on the theme. Lockwood has no M.F.A., she never even went to college. She married at 21, has scarcely ever held a job and, by her telling, seems to have spent her adult life in a Proustian attitude, writing for hours each day from her “desk-bed.” Now, at 32, Lockwood finds herself on the verge of literary fame, a product of ill fortune followed by good fortune and the perhaps naïve expectations of success that only an outsider can maintain.

Lockwood, who goes by “Tricia,” may be best known for her persona on Twitter, where her steady stream of surreal, sexually explicit and often sexually impossible humor has won her 30,000 followers and a string of admirers in the world of comedy. Andy Richter, the longtime sidekick to Conan O’Brien, considers her a friend, though he has never met her offline: “She’s funny, she’s interesting and she’s a weirdo — which is all I ask for in a person.” Megan Amram, a writer for “Parks and Recreation,” came across Lockwood’s poetry first, relishing her ability to “heighten pop culture to saintly levels,” and then found her Twitter feed. “Both of us love the subversion of common sayings or verbal tropes,” Amram told me, “and we also love making fun of the way women are viewed as sex objects.” Rob Delaney, whom Comedy Central called “the funniest person on Twitter” and who has more than a million Twitter followers, heard about Lockwood from Amram. He “went insane,” he said, “and read everything by her.”

Lockwood’s Twitter “sexts” — inspired by political scandals and cable-news stories on the sexual menace of cellphones — reimagine the sweaty-thumbed expression of a generation’s libido as a kind of gnomic poetry. She began composing the sexts in 2011, and soon online journals were compiling their favorites. The Huffington Post ran an article with the headline: “Patricia Lockwood’s Sext Poems Will Make You LOL.” Many are unprintable in these pages, but here’s a taste:

Sext: I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You
put your whole head through me

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

Venus in Fur / Roman Polanski and the man who invented masochism

Roman Polanski and the man who invented masochism

On the UK release of Roman Polanski's Venus in Fur Nicholas Blincoe returns to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novella, a sweetshop of seduction and suspense

by Nicholas Blincoe
The Guardian, Friday 23 May 2014

Pulling strings … Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric in Venus in Fur. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Roman Polanski´s new film, Venus in Fur, sent me back to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 1870 novella with every intention of writing a stern, authoritative appraisal. Inevitably, I was soon playing around with Google Maps as I plotted a journey from Lviv, the birthplace of Sacher-Masoch; through Nowy Sacz, home to Isidor Isaak Sadger, the psychiatrist who coined the term sadomasochist; to Krakow, the city where Roman Polanski was born. The entire trip would take no more than four hours by car, five tops, through the old kingdom of Galicia, now western Ukraine and Poland.

Venus in Fur
Production year: 2013
Country: France
Runtime: 90 mins
Directors: Roman Polanski
Cast: Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric
More on this film

The term "masochism" first appears in Richard Krafft-Ebing's 1886 forensic reference book,Psychopathia Sexualis. So does "sadism", for that matter, but the Marquis de Sade had been dead for 72 years. Sacher-Masoch was very much alive, and aghast to discover how his name had been used. He was a famous author and social reformer, the editor of On the Highest, a radical magazine that fought for Jewish rights and female emancipation. Suddenly, he was a sexual preference. The term stuck. No one who has read Venus in Furswill be surprised to learn that Sacher-Masoch was a masochist, who was moderately successful at encouraging women to play along. Without his talent for persuasion, he might have been a very unhappy man – and he would certainly not have been a writer, because his gift for making the dubious seem plausible lies at the heart of his work. In Venus in Furs, Severin von Kusiemski convinces the lively and affectionate Wanda von Dunajew that her true, hidden self that he adores is cold and cruel. Wanda obliging turns herself into an ice queen. Sacher-Masoch is the kind of slave who is forever pulling the strings.

Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate

Roman Polanski writes foreword to book about murdered wife, Sharon Tate

Jane Fonda and Joan Collins also contribute to volume about actor, who was killed by followers of Charles Manson in 1969

Ben Child
The Guardian, Tuesday 27 May 2013

Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate in 1969, the year she was killed at her LA home by members of Charles Manson's 'family'. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski has written the foreword to a forthcoming book about the life of his murdered wife, Sharon Tate, reports the New York Post..

Tate was killed by followers of Charles Manson in 1969, along with three friends who were staying with her at the Los Angeles home she shared with her husband. The 26-year-old actor was due to give birth just two weeks after her death.

Polanski, who was out of town when the attacks took place, writes in the foreword: "Even after 40 years, it is difficult to write about Sharon. It is impossible, of course, to imagine what might have been if Sharon had lived. But this book allows me to remember what was."

The book, titled Recollection, has been put together by Sharon's sister Debra and will be published in the US next month. It also features contributions from its subject's co-stars on the 1967 cult drama Valley of the Dolls, Patty Duke, Joan Collins and Jane Fonda. The last writes: "She was very pregnant the last time I saw her at that house and turned down a joint that was being passed around."

THE GUARDIAN

DRAGON

Roman Polanski writes foreword to book about murdered wife, Sharon Tate

Venus in Fur / Roman Polanski and the man who invented masochism

Chinatown / The best crime film of all time

Roman Polanski sparks controversy after complaining that birth control pills are making women masculine and calling gender equality 'idiotic'

Roman Polanski / Repulsion / Chinatown / Reviews

The dazed brutality at the heart of Roman Polanski's films

Roman Polanski's Based on a True Story added to Cannes film festival lineup

RIMBAUD

Roman Polanski / La Vénus à la fourrure

L'extradition de Polanski définitivement refusée par la Pologne

Nastassja Kinski & Roman Polanksi

Roman Polanski / "D’après une histoire vraie" de Roman Polanski / Invraisemblablement plat

DE OTROS MUNDOS

Polanski / The Ghost Writer

Samantha Geimer / La niña de Polanski

Carlos Boyero / Polanski y Jim Jarmusch

Polanski / Sólo el tiempo trae consuelo

Polonia y los Oscar / Una larga historia de amor

Polanski / Dickens es duro, sarcástico e irónico

El gobierno polaco quiere entregar a Polanski a Estados Unidos

Nastassja Kinski y Roman Polanski

El infinito Polanski / La venus de las pieles

Polanski / La venus de las pieles / En mitad de una tormenta

El maldito Polanski

Roman Polanski & Emmanuelle Seigner / Cannes 2013

Roman Polanski fracasa en su último intento de volver a Estados Unidos

Polanski / Memorias de un cineasta siempre controvertido, nunca contradictorio

Polanski / El eterno juguetón

Emmanuelle Seigner / La esposa

Las mujeres más bellas del mundo / Emmanuelle Seigner

El triángulo amoroso entre Roman Polanski, Eva Green y Emmanuelle Seigner

PESSOA

Roman Polanski / Só o tempo consola

Monday, May 26, 2014

The 100 best novels / No 36 / The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 36

The Golden Bowl

by Henry James (1904)

American literature contains nothing else quite like Henry James's amazing, labyrinthine and claustrophic novel

Robert McCrum

Monday 26 May 2014

here's an old joke (which only makes complete sense in Britain) that there are three, not one, manifestations of Henry James: James the First (The Portrait of a Lady); James the Second (The Turn of the Screw); and the Old Pretender (The Wings of the Dove; The Golden Bowl).

As we approach another giant in this series – for some, the only American writer of greater significance than Mark Twain or F Scott Fitzgerald – I've chosen to skip James I and II, and settle on late James, the Old Pretender, and his masterpiece, The Golden Bowl, a novel that takes its title from Ecclesiastes 12:6-7 ("Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern… then shall the dust return to the earth as it was…").I've made this choice for three reasons. First, because it addresses James's essential theme, the meeting of two great cultures, English and American, and mixes it with the sinister menace of his middle period. Second, because the novel is so intensely (maddeningly, some would say) Jamesian, often hovering between the difficult and the incomprehensible. And finally, because his last novel places him where he belongs, at the very beginning of the 20th century.

Henry James

The Golden Bowl opens with Prince Amerigo, a charming Italian nobleman of reduced means, coming to London for his marriage to Maggie Verver, the only child of the wealthy widower Adam Verver, an American financier and art connoisseur.

The plot then reprises a Henry James short story of 1891 (The Marriages), in which a father and daughter become hopelessly caught up in "a mutual passion, an intrigue", a complex tale of treachery and betrayal made more complex by the fact that James, who suffered acutely from writer's cramp, dictated it to a typist every morning over a period of 13 months. Not since the blind John Milton dictated chunks of Paradise Lost to his daughters has a prominent writer expressed so much of his vision through the medium of the spoken word.Each reader will take something different from this amazing, labyrinthine, terrifying and often claustrophobic narrative. For me, the dominant theme – very close to James's heart – is the story of Maggie Verver's education, both literal and emotional, and her subtle resolution of an impossible and perhaps dreadful situation. At the end, Maggie has saved her marriage, and her father prepares to return to America, leaving his daughter older, wiser and (apparently) reconciled to her husband. American literature contains nothing else quite like The Golden Bowl.

A note on the text

The Golden Bowl is one of the first truly 20th-century novels: it was never serialised, but first published in New York in December 1904 by Charles Scribner's Sons in two volumes, and then in London in February 1905 by Methuen in a one-volume edition. In 1909, a revised text appeared as volumes 23 and 24 of the New York edition, together with one of James's magisterial prefaces in which, with sometimes tortuous circumlocution, he reflected on the art of fiction as he understood it. Many years before, in The Art of Fiction, a brilliant, almost polemical declaration on behalf of the novel as an art form, he had written "A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like every other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts." The Golden Bowl supremely exemplifies this claim, providing a literary texture of staggering complexity and richness.