Thursday, November 8, 2012

My hero / Barack Obama by Lorrie Moore

Barack Obama

My hero: 

Barack Obama by Lorrie Moore

'Could a black man be elected president twice? Many voters thought not'


Lorrie Moore
Thu 8 Nov 2012


T
he sheen is often off a second-term US president, even if the question of his being re-elected (or ever elected to begin with) has been put to rest. This has happened with ostensibly unthinkable candidates such as Ronald Reagan: once an ageing right-wing ex-movie star crashes through the gates of one's imagination into the White House and sets up shop there, perhaps anything at all can occur. Can a black man be elected president of the US? Well, yes! Can it happen twice? Many American voters thought not.
"Especially in this economy." That's a phrase voters have heard repeatedly in the past year in almost every context, from online dating to real-estate speculation. It has been noted that the second term for a president is almost always won by a larger margin than his initial win – he has already proven himself presidential and so that hurdle in the public mind has been overcome; sea-to-shining-sea acceptance can proceed like a warm bath of mixed metaphor over the electorate. But this did not happen for Obama – although, unlike Carter or Bush Sr, he also did not lose.
In his campaign against Romney, Obama seemed up against someone who already looked more like the president than he did, or at least looked like an actor playing the president on a TV show – albeit one from the last century. These telegenics appeared to give Romney an advantage in the debates over a reserved, thin African-American who is trying not to smoke. With all that money thrown into the competition, might Romney win?

Yet money, in the wake of a Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited spending, did not seem to have the final word, since there was so disgustingly much of it that campaign ad oversaturation caused many voters to mute the television and avoid the phone. And yet they still headed to the polls on election day. Substance won out. Even if the charisma, the aura, the unreasonable expectations, the heroic dimensions have tumbled away and left an actual human citizen, it is a citizen who is calm, high-minded, principled, practical and intelligent. It all means a real person was elected. (One who instituted some barebones national health care and is looking to reform Wall Street and the tax system; perhaps one who is even thinking about giving Romney a job.) The drone attacks on American citizens in Yemen, the ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead lilt to the national foreign policy discussion, the hang-gliding off the so-called fiscal cliff will all be set aside for now. Nothing is perfect. One has to rejoice in the pretty good.


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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Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Ian Fleming / James Bond / Covers




Covers
James Bond
by Ian Fleming
July 1, 2012


In 2008 Penguin released hardback editions of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books. Before, the James Bond covers had been forgettable and very recently kind of a like a cartoon scribble with lots of bright colours and images. (These were the covers I had – no idea who published them since I don’t own those books any more)
Thankfully Penguin understood that things needed to change. They hired Michael Gillette who went and redesigned and redrew every cover. The end result was, and still is, pretty spectacular. When the books were released I remember Waterstones (back in the day when they had an apostrophe in there) giving away postcard packs of the covers. They went on my wall that day and are still up there. At first my Mum found it hilarious that I had a bunch of semi-naked women all over the place, now it’s normal.
It’s really hard to choose between them since I really do love them all. Have a look on his website for the covers I don’t post.

















Not long after my parents had relocated the family from the cold, damp and impressively windy Highlands of Scotland to the less cold, only marginally less damp, but no-doubt-about-it impressively windy island of Jersey, I was invited to a rich classmate's seventh birthday party. You could tell he was rich since on the way home from school in my parents' car we passed his house. This took a while.
The signature feature of this boy's party was something so unimaginably cool that I still think of it now with fondness and envy: a home cinema. Now this wasn't some tarted-up plasma screen under a ridiculous nom de guerre available on special offer at Curries. This was the mid-1970s. A home cinema meant a roll-up screen and stand, a 16mm projector, speakers and reels of film. In his house. My jaw drops still when I think about it.
Anyway, the home cinema treated us to an abridged twenty-minute version of Live and Let Die. Being six at the time, I loved every butchered minute of it. No matter that it was one sixth the length of the original, featured cartoon-Bond Roger Moore - yet to succumb to the claggy embrace of a safari suit - and clearly could not have made any sense whatsoever. At that age as long as some things got smashed up and people got hit in an entertaining way, what was not to like?
A few years later my mother gave me a book club edition that featured two James Bond novels, Dr No and From Russia with Love. On the cover was a poorly cutout bikini-clad Ursula Andress - from that still - emerging from the water pasted on top of a scarlet background. Being a book club edition it was a hardback. Being a book club edition every other expense had been spared. You could tell because they'd managed to place the novels out of order. This might not have mattered but for the fact that frequently in Fleming's Bond books one story leads directly onto the next. In this case, From Russia with Love ends with a cliffhanger putting the survival of Bond in doubt, while Dr No begins by recounting the agent's recovery. Or, if you were reading my book club version, at the beginning Bond gets better from the poisoning he will receive some 500 pages later. Such unconventional linearity gave Bond an unexpected modernist slant.
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However, it is this sort of basic inattention to details that has often been all too obvious in past editions. For much of the forty-four years since his death his books have been treated by a succession of publishers rather like that bizarre home cinema experience: a fast, enjoyable thrill not to be taken too seriously or paid much attention to, and something that is certainly not for adults.
The centenary of Fleming's birth was clearly a good time to revisit the Bonds and cover them in a package that says, yes these are fun, but also makes it implicit that there's no reason not to take them seriously. Most importantly, they should look like books worth owning.




I know I said I don’t have a favourite but I think The Spy Who Loved Me is pretty special. It’s also one of the covers which Waterstones didn’t have in the pack – figures!
I appreciate good cover art (hence this post) but when it comes to designing books it can’t be forgotten that there is more to the book than just the cover – you have the back and the spine. I hate boring spines, especially when the front of the book is so beautiful.
Again, my hat goes off to Penguin.
And I love Penguin’s logo in the 007! (And I can even live with all the butt and boob poses flying about)
To that end Michael Gillette was commissioned to paint fourteen iconic covers. The books were numbered on their spines so it's not hard to read them in order (if you're traditionally minded). The blurbs, adapted from earlier Penguin editions, were themed around the new unified concept. Fourteen book biographies, one for each back flap, replaced the usual author biography (which is found on page one). A short extract from each book graces the back cover. They were made into demi-format hardbacks to be not so much collectible as bloody irresistible.
Having worked on the Bond novels on and off for eight years – and these are the fourth set Penguin have done in that time – I can attest to their enduring appeal. And you won't find a safari suit in sight.
The new Bond hardbacks are published on May 29th. 
Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter


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Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Richard Williams / When Ian Fleming tried to escape James Bond


Ian Fleming

When Ian Fleming 

tried to escape James Bond

by Richard Williams


With The Spy Who Loved Me, Ian Fleming took an ambitious gamble: abandoning Bond for much of the book in favour of a female narrator. As Skyfall opens, Richard Williams remembers a surprising heroine
Ian Fleming in his Study
'An inner urge for novelty': Fleming in his study. Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis
Vivienne Michel is perhaps the least well-known of the women for whomIan Fleming arranged assignations with James Bond, and yet none of her more celebrated sisters, from Vesper Lynd through Tatiana Romanovaand Pussy Galore to the Countess Teresa di Vicenzo, succeeded in engaging the author's interest to the same extent. To her alone is accorded the honour of a Bond book written entirely in her voice, with 007 making a late appearance in a supporting role. And although, unlike some of the others, she survived to tell the tale, she was destined to suffer a different kind of literary death.
Few novelists in Fleming's position, riding the public's voracious appetite for the adventures of a fictional hero, would opt for the sort of risk that he took with The Spy Who Loved Me in 1962. By the time he came to write the ninth of his Bond books, the already massive popularity of his creation was about to be transformed, by the release of the film of Dr No, into a cultural phenomenon. Yet his health was starting to collapse, along with his interest in maintaining the formula established with the publication ofCasino Royale, Bond's debut, nine years earlier. His response to an inner urge for novelty, and perhaps a desire for a more elevated kind of acclaim, was to employ an entirely different voice and to hold back the appearance of his celebrated protagonist until after the halfway point of the story.
Although in From Russia, With Love, five years earlier, he had filled the opening 77 pages with Rosa Klebb, Donovan Grant and Tatiana Romanova before bringing Bond on to the stage, there was never any doubt about the identity of the central character, and the device was a success. In the case of The Spy Who Loved Me, however, delay was not answered by gratification, and Fleming's gamble ended with his readers and reviewers feeling betrayed by the sudden change of tack and tone. "His ability to invent a plot has deserted him almost entirely," the Glasgow Herald's critic harrumphed, "and he has had to substitute for a fast-moving story the sorry misadventures of an upper-class tramp, told in dreary detail." A chastened Fleming wrote to Michael Howard, his publisher at Jonathan Cape, to insist that plans for a paperback edition should be abandoned; today's authors and publishers might be surprised to learn that his desire was honoured, at least until after his death two years later.
Wisely, the current paperback edition omits the coy prologue written by Fleming for the original publication, a memo to the reader in which he claimed that the manuscript of The Spy Who Loved Me had simply materialised on his desk one day, along with a note from one "Vivienne Michel", asserting authorship of this narrative of what she claimed to have been a real incident. "I was interested in this view of James Bond, through the wrong end of a telescope, so to speak," Fleming wrote, "and after obtaining clearance for certain minor infringements of the Official Secrets Act I have much pleasure in sponsoring its publication."
His narrator recounts her childhood in Canada, her education and early working life in England and her decision, at the age of 23, to return to North America and embark on a road trip from Quebec to Florida. In the Adirondacks, short of money, she accepts an offer of $60 to spend a night looking after an empty motel that is about to be closed for the winter. Two thugs arrive from New York (via Central Casting: their names are Sluggsy and Horror), apparently working for the owner. They are about to have their way with her in preparation for burning the place down in an insurance fire and leaving her corpse to take the blame, when Bond appears out of the stormy night, having suffered a puncture on the way from Nassau, and the conclusion of Operation Thunderball, to Toronto, where he has been assigned to protect a Russian defector. Thereafter Fleming gives us the standard mayhem in which Bond routs the hoodlums before sleeping with the girl in a scene that finds the author using his female narrator to express a view for which he has been roundly and regularly condemned: "All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful."
Fleming, a confirmed fan of sadism in his own relationship, certainly meant it. In Casino Royale he had Bond musing in similar terms on the prospect of sex with Vesper Lynd: "And now he knew that … the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would have the sweet tang of rape." Which makes it more than a little surprising that the most interesting and convincing section of the book, and the one adding weight to the contention that Fleming could actually write, is the one in which Vivienne Michel introduces herself and describes the circumstances of her life up the point at which it is disrupted by Sluggsy and Horror.
Like Jay McInerney, who followed the fashionable success of Bright Lights, Big City in the mid-80s with the poorly received Story of My Life, written in the voice of a 20-year-old New York party girl, Fleming attempts to locate the vocabulary and formulations that his narrator would use in writing a diary or talking into a recording device: something quite different from his usual prose. But whereas McInerney produced a cokehead's stream of heightened (or debased) consciousness, Fleming summons the voice of an intelligent middle-class young woman of the 1950s. Clearly drawing extensively on the experiences of female acquaintances in his active private life and in his professional capacity as the well-connected foreign manager of the Sunday Times, he allows Michel to tell her story in her own way, complete with the occasional girlish exclamation mark.
Orphaned at an early age, she is brought up by an aunt who sends her, at the age of 16, to England to be "finished" at the sort of Home Counties establishment – still to be found in the 1960s but presumably now extinct – where flower arranging and cordon bleu cookery led the curriculum. For her season as a debutante she moves to London, shares a flat off Kings Road and finds her way into the Chelsea scene. Soon she is losing her virginity rather messily to an Oxford undergraduate called Derek; there is a vividly evoked scene, apparently drawn from Fleming's memory of his own defloration, of their discovery in flagrante by a flashlight-wielding cinema manager.
Discarded by Derek, she gets a job on a local paper and, having learnt to spot and sell a story, is inspired by a cast of real-life Fleet Street figures: "My gods, or rather goddesses (Katharine Whitehorn and Penelope Gilliatt were outside my orbit), were Drusilla Beyfus, Veronica Papworth, Jean Campbell, Shirley Lord, Barbara Griggs and Anne Sharpley." She joins the London staff of a foreign news agency run by a German who gets her pregnant and sends her to Zurich for an abortion, while giving her a month's pay in lieu of notice. Her sense of bewilderment and humiliation during these various ordeals is drawn with surprising empathy, accurately reflecting the prevailing mood and mores of the pre-feminist times.
Fleming was in his early 50s and his health was already causing concern when he wrote The Spy Who Loved Me during his customary yearly stay at Goldeneye, his home on the north coast of Jamaica. That Christmas he had been no longer fit enough to ski on a family holiday in St Moritz. His relationship with his wife Ann, the former Lady Rothermere, was in difficulties, provoked in part by their unconcealed infidelities but also by the tendency of Ann's circle of literary friends, who included Evelyn Waugh, to look down on a mere writer of spy thrillers, their disdain almost certainly exacerbated by his commercial success.
There was an added anxiety when Thunderball, in which he resisted a strong urge to kill off Bond once and for all, was published in March 1961, despite a protracted and strenuous attempt by Kevin McClory, an Irish film producer with whom he had initially worked on the story, to secure an injunction. A fortnight after the book's appearance Fleming suffered a coronary during a Sunday Times editorial conference and spent a month in the London Clinic. During his convalescence, a deal with Eon Films was completed, giving him $100,000 per film and a 5% share of the producers' profits, starting with Dr No. Then he travelled to Goldeneye, where, ignoring his doctor's strict instruction to cut his consumption of alcohol and cigarettes, he set to work on The Spy Who Loved Me.
The manuscript was revised, and its US sequences checked by an American librarian who had written during the summer of 1961 to point out errors in the transatlantic chapters of Thunderball. The cover art was prepared in the usual trompe l'oeil style of the Bond hardbacks by the artist Richard Chopping, whose fee of 250 guineas bust Cape's 25-guinea budget and was made up by the author himself. MeanwhileThunderball was proving to be a massive success, hugely boosted in the US by a Life magazine story in which the young president John F Kennedy numbered the creator of James Bond among his favourite authors.
Perhaps Fleming hoped to use The Spy Who Loved Me to demonstrate that he could broaden his literary range. For all the artlessness of Vivienne Michel's voice, he kept hold of his ability to flood his story with beguiling incidental detail, tinged with his usual amused scorn for American habits. Here he goes easy on the brand names so beloved of Bond, the mention of Michel's 150cc Vespa Gran Sport scooter and her Ferragamo sandals being among relatively few exceptions. More important, this most easily and frequently parodied of authors also displays his seldom noted feeling for the cadence of sentences and paragraphs, something that emerges in all his books amid the passages of mechanical clunkiness, and which has steadfastly eluded the army of novelists, including Kingsley Amis, Sebastian Faulks and most recently Jeffery Deaver, attempting what are known as "continuation" volumes.
"I was running away," Michel's narrative starts. "I was running away from England, from my childhood, from the winter, from a sequence of untidy, unattractive love-affairs, from the few sticks of furniture and jumble of overworn clothes that my London life had collected around me; and I was running away from drabness, fustiness, snobbery, the claustrophobia of close horizons and from my inability, although I am quite an attractive rat, to make headway in the rat-race. In fact, I was running away from almost everything, except the law."
Not a bad opening, in anyone's language, and there is more, including an amusing digression a few pages later concerning her vehement dislike of pine forests: surely Fleming's own, since the Bond books thrive on his own prejudices and discoveries. This is the Fleming capable of phrases that could lodge themselves in the memory for life, such as his description of the platform of Istanbul's Sirkeci station, as Bond prepares to board the Orient Express in From Russia With Love, "throbbing with the tragic poetry of departure".
The lengthy denouement of The Spy Who Loved Me is clumsy and clichéd, as if telling Michel's backstory had exhausted Fleming's interest, but the book remains a worthwhile curiosity whose poor reception must have pained its author. The failure also forced him back into a more familiar mode. A year later Bond was present on the very first page of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, in one of Fleming's most effective opening sequences, set on the beach at Royale-les-Eaux, the invented Picardy resort where readers had first encountered him in Casino Royale. The experiment was over. And when, 15 years later, they came to make a film of The Spy Who Loved Me, the only thing they kept was the title.

• Skyfall is on general release.






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Monday, November 5, 2012

Bérénice Marlohe / Only for your eyes




Beautiful Women

The Lust List: Bérénice Marlohe

Our Femme Fatale is a French model-actress who just happens to be the new Bond girl in this fall's Skyfall. Get your first look at Bérénice Marlohe—we like her shaken, not stirred-

 


The Femme Fatale: Bérénice Marlohe
How You Know Her: French model-actress making her English-language film debut this fall in Skyfall, the twenty-third James Bond movie. (Although if you watch a lot of French TV, you may know her from Equipe Médicale d'Urgence.) Doesn't look like she'll have trouble selling the whole "I will totally cut your throat over some microfilm" thing.



http://www.gq.com/women/photos/201202/lust-list-berenice-marlohe-bond-girl-skyfall#slide=1
Read More http://www.gq.com/women/photos/201202/lust-list-berenice-marlohe-bond-girl-skyfall#ixzz2BHJ1HoEQ

Berenice Marlohe
ONLY FOR YOUR EYES


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 Berenica Marlohe
Skyfall

http://es-us.omg.yahoo.com/fotos/la-chica-bond-con-sensual-escote-slideshow/#crsl=%252Ffotos%252Fla-chica-bond-con-sensual-escote-slideshow%252Fcar0062-berl%25C3%25ADn-alemania-30-10-2012-actor-brit%25C3%25A1nico-photo-195245277.html

 Berenice Marlohe
OTHERS PHOTOS







Berenice Marlohe - Maxim USA November 2012 (4)

Berenice Marlohe - Maxim USA November 2012 (6)





Berenice Marlohe - Maxim USA November 2012 (3)



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