 Amy Adams Andrew H. Walker RETRATOS  Anne Hathaway  Jeffrey Tambor |
Monday, January 16, 2017
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Saturday, January 14, 2017
My writing day / Tessa Hadley / ‘Some of my best ideas come in the bath’
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| ‘Some writers, if they are in the middle of a novel, are possessed by it; it’s not like that for me’ … Tessa Hadley. Illustration by Alan Vest |
Tessa Hadley: ‘Some of my best ideas come in the bath’
The author on putting writing on hold for everyday life, and finding inspirationTessa Hadley
Saturday 14 January 2017
T
his is the time of year when I’ve forgotten I have a writing day. Not forgotten it intellectually, but forgotten it in my body, which has fallen into that other rhythm: of household things, family, children and grandchildren and parents, sociability, planning. My writing self waits – I really want to say, though it’s a cliche, in the wings. I like the picture the cliche conjures, of a sociable self performing noisily, exaggeratedly, on a pantomime stage with painted backdrop and familiar old props – Christmas tree, pile of presents, table heaped over and over again with papier-mache stage food, everyone wearing the same old paper hats they wore last year. And in the midst of all the noise and laughter and melodrama (the predictable fallings-out and weepy reconciliations) a glimpse of another silent self, hanging about backstage more or less patiently, a kind of phantom at the pantomime, waiting to get back to a different kind of work.
For long years, before I was published, when I was writing and writing and not managing to “breed one work that wakes” – to borrow Gerard Manley Hopkins’ wonderful, terrible words (“why must / Disappointment all I endeavour end?”) – that secret self waiting in the wings was a haunted, fugitive, shamed figure. I couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t not do it. Bizarrely and inexplicably, if I couldn’t write, then somehow my other life, the real one, wasn’t quite real either. The two selves – the performer and her shadow – turned out to be inseparable. Each needed, for her own real life, the reality of the other one.
I know some writers, if they are in the middle of a novel, think about it all the time, they’re seized and possessed by it, until it almost blots out for them their other, daily lives. But it’s not quite like that for me. Of course when I’m in the thick of writing, working on a novel or a story day after day, then I am thinking about it a lot, I’m absorbed in it. Some of my best ideas come in the bath, or in bed just after I’ve put the light out; I have to put the light on again, apologising, and get out of the bed to fetch my notebook. These aren’t usually ideas for sentences, or images; they’re more likely to be the shapes of things that could happen, or must happen, to my characters. There is a dreamy moment just before sleep carries me away, when imagination is especially good at foreseeing, feeling its way to the true next thing. What would he do, after that had happened? What would become of her, after she found out? How might that next scene unfold?
Once I’ve left the novel alone for a few days, however, I stop moving around inside its spaces of possibility. The unfinished novel feels like a room shut up inside me; going about the business of my other life I’m aware of it but don’t open the closed door to look inside, though I keep its key in my pocket, fingering it sometimes to remind myself. And then the day comes – unremarkable to anyone else, remarkable to me – when I sit down to my novel again at last. Huge trepidation. At first I can’t remember being the person who chose these words, this story; I can hardly remember what it was I wrote just before I left off. When I read the novel through, I may see from the cool distance that comes with separation that it’s all wrong: too prosy and dull, or too exposed and raw, or fake.
But let’s suppose it’s all right, it’s alive enough for me to begin again where I left off. I write at a little table in the bedroom: I’ve always feared that a dedicated study could overwhelm the spark which seems to depend on accident, a sideways approach, a kind of calculated carelessness. I might read a few sentences of something brilliantly good (Elizabeth Bowen, Alice Munro, Shirley Hazzard) to build a bridge across the threshold into writing. Then work begins. Such hard work, such a joyous freedom: welding the words together, bringing something new into being. A paradoxical mix of extreme strained effort with dreamy relinquishment. My real life can go and lie down for a while. My other real life has taken over.
Mexican Musical Legende / Fight for Mexican crooner Juan Gabriel’s fortune reveals his many secrets
Fight for Mexican crooner Juan Gabriel’s fortune reveals his many secrets
Since the death of the musical idol, the existence of children born out of wedlock claiming their share of the pie has come to light
English version by Susana Urra.
Mexico City 12 ENE 2017 - 08:09 COT
Behind the diaphanous shirts, the sharp cheekbones and the enigmatic smile that served as his only answer to uncomfortable questions, there was Alberto Aguilera Valadez. And when the larger-than-life Juan Gabriel died, Alberto Aguilera returned to the forefront – and with him, so did details about the most intimate and well-hidden parts of his private life.
Friday, January 13, 2017
Juan Gabriel / Bigger than his music
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| Juan Gabriel |
Juan Gabriel
Bigger than his music
English version by Dyane Jean François
Things I learned by traveling to Mexico: never, under any circumstances, even if you are surrounded by hipsters and metal-heads, make fun of Juan Gabriel
30 AGO 2016 - 10:00 COT
Thursday, January 12, 2017
Legendary Mexican showman Juan Gabriel dies of a heart attack
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| Juan Gabriel |
Legendary Mexican showman Juan Gabriel dies of a heart attack
The singer-songwriter passed away on Sunday morning in Santa Monica, California
English version by Dyane Jean François.
SONIA CORONA
Mexico 29 AGO 2016 - 10:20 COT
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra review / Intriguing, but hardly nourishing
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| Alejandro Zambra |
Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra review – intriguing, but hardly nourishing
Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra’s amusing linguistic acrobatics tease the brain but fail to dig deeper
Sunday 23 October 2016 10.00 BST
T
he structure of this intriguing little book draws on the national university entrance exam that Alejandro Zambra sat in his native Chile in 1993. Comprising 90 multiple-choice questions, it starts as comic wordplay but morphs gradually into a volley of melancholy nano-stories played out on terrain familiar from Zambra’s previous work: lazy schooldays, fizzled-out love affairs and the half-buried iniquities of life in a former dictatorship.
An early question asks us to mark one of five words with “no relation” to the word “blacklist”: “backlist”, “checklist”, “playlist”, “shitlist” and “novelist”. If that made you laugh, you’ll get on well with Multiple Choice, at least at first; the book’s energy leans heavily on the kind of category-switching curveball Zambra throws when he (or his presumably highly acrobatic translator, Megan McDowell) writes “novelist”.
Sometimes the change-ups do more than raise a smile: when we fill in the blanks in the sentence, “What is impossible for… is possible for…”, choosing from “men... God”, “men... women”, “the right... the left”, “Rebecca... Becky”, “the poor... the rich”, you wonder what Becky can do that she can’t as Rebecca. But mainly you feel the options play for laughs: one question asks if a particular story’s narrator doesn’t mention his wife’s name because “a) He wants to protect her” or “d) He’s a misogynist”.
Later we are invited to reorder the sentences in a series of deadpan five-step narratives that feature someone describing his conception during a curfew under Pinochet and (among others) a woman with breast cancer and dementia who can’t recognise her family but “never forgot she was missing a breast”.
While there’s a degree of brain-flexing fun to be had in thinking through the various permutations on offer, the sense grows that Zambra’s elaborate furniture is just that: a frictionless frame for stories that might have existed equally well on their own.
Proof, perhaps, comes in the book’s climactic comprehension exercises related to three memoir-ish stories, each a few pages long. The chewiest of them follows someone who tells his 18-year-old son that he left his mother because he felt too young to have a child. He admits that in his early 20s he readily used the phrase “I have a son” to mean “I’m a serious man, I have lived, I’m responsible, I have a history, so go to bed with me. And the next morning... Sorry, I have to go, you have to go, I have a son”.
In the appended questions, the comedy of Zambra’s absurdly divergent and digressive multiple-choice answers shades into glibness: when we’re asked which character we relate to most, the options include “none”, “the son, obviously” and “the mother, because I also got pregnant at that age, but I had an abortion. I regretted it so many times... but after reading this story I think it may not have been such a bad decision.”
Zambra is talented – no doubt about it – but it’s hard to escape the feeling that, despite its inventive form, Multiple Choice amounts to little more than a cute jeu d’esprit, amusing but hardly nourishing.
Multiple Choice is published by Granta (£12).
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin / Review by Anthony Cummins
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| Lucia Berlin |
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin review – matter-of-fact but moving short stories
Lucia Berlin’s short stories have an undeniable air of authenticity
Anthony CumminsSunday 4 September 2016 11.00 BST
H
ow to account for the posthumous rise to prominence of Lucia Berlin, who died in 2004, aged 68, relatively little read before the publication of these selected stories? Perhaps our sense of their authenticity has something to do with it. Drawn on an itinerant life across North and South America with four sons and three husbands, Berlin’s work – so often about work, from cleaning to translating – sits well amid the reality-hungry vogue for memoir-streaked fiction; her level-headed portrayal of women’s experience can’t hurt
And she’s a very sharp writer: witty, straight talking and non-maudlin when dealing with dark material. She published 76 stories in all; about half appear here. Sometimes, the pieces unspool as if in dialogue with an unseen interviewer prodding the narrator’s memory; one story begins: “Wait. Let me explain…” These conversational items tend to catalogue the idiosyncrasies of a particular job, as in the title piece, which advises never to leave your employer’s things where you find them (“Let them know you are thorough”). The nurse who narrates Emergency Notebook, 1977 yearns for “a good cut-and-dried stabbing” when faced with endless malingerers; later, she decides that “fear, poverty, alcoholism and loneliness” are “terminal illnesses. Emergencies, in fact”.
Berlin herself drank and trouble with alcohol fuels several of the stories focused on family life: in Unmanageable, a woman struggles to get through the night when her 13-year-old son hides her keys and wallet. Another narrator has a testy relationship in adulthood with her sister, Sally, damaged by an alcoholic mother whom they suspect was molested by their grandfather, if their own experience is anything to go by.
Such subjects are treated unsensationally but the stories can be heartrending too, usually when they roam wider. In Carmen, a pregnant mother of two goes on a drug run for her heroin-addled partner and gets slapped in the face for mucking it up because she needed to pee; Mijito follows a homeless Latina who can’t understand the advice she’s given when her baby son needs an operation.
Berlin’s storytelling runs on the hard-nosed wisdom of someone who has made their peace with all that life has to offer, for good or ill. If only she’d published more, you think; but then you realise that the work that kept her away from writing probably supported it, too, in more ways than one.
A Manual for Cleaning Women is published by Picador (£8.99).
FICCIONES
DE OTROS MUNDOS
Alicia Kopf, Lucia Berlin y Francesca Senna / Tres mujeres ‘incómodas’ se llevan el premio Llibreter
Los diez mejores libros de 2016
Alicia Kopf, Lucia Berlin y Francesca Senna / Tres mujeres ‘incómodas’ se llevan el premio Llibreter
Los diez mejores libros de 2016
Elvira Lindo / Ellas lo contaron mejor
La maldita Lucia Berlin / La complejidad biográfica y literaria de una gran escritora
La segunda vida de Lucia Berlin
Elvira Lindo / Lucia Berlin es un milagro
Grandiosa escritora / Lo nuevo de Lucia Berlin
La maldita Lucia Berlin / La complejidad biográfica y literaria de una gran escritora
La segunda vida de Lucia Berlin
Elvira Lindo / Lucia Berlin es un milagro
Grandiosa escritora / Lo nuevo de Lucia Berlin
El libro de papel resiste en el año de las escritoras
Lucia Berlin / Contra lo normal
Laura Fernández / En busca de la nueva Lucia Berlin
La sonrisa maldita de Lucia Berlin
Lucia Berlin / Contra lo normal
Laura Fernández / En busca de la nueva Lucia Berlin
La sonrisa maldita de Lucia Berlin
Cuentos
Lucia Berlin / Manual para mujeres de la limpiezaLucia Berlin / Inmanejable
Lucia Berlin / Espera un momento
DRAGON
The 10 Best Short Story Collections of the DecadeLucia Berlin / Lost in the Louvre
Evening in Paradise / More Stories by Lucia Berlin / Review
Lucia Berlin’s Harrowing, Radiant Fiction
Lucia Berlin / Memories of Mexico
The Short Autofictions of Eve Babitz, Lucia Berlin and Bette Howland
Smoking with Lucia Berlin by Elizabeth Geoghegan
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
DANTE
Storie di sante / Lucia Berlin e Eileen Myles
Monday, January 9, 2017
Golden Globes 2017 / The full list of winners
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| Isabelle Huppert accepting the award for best actress in a motion picture drama for her role in ‘Elle’ |
Golden Globes 2017: the full list of winners
The ceremony was led by nominations for La La Land, The Crown, Moonlight and Westworld – and La La Land delivered, winning a record seven awards
Monday 9 January 2017 07.40 GMT
Saturday, January 7, 2017
My writing day / Emma Donoghue / ‘I have only from 8.30am to 3.30pm to work. It’s a very healthy discipline’
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| ‘A first draft is indecisive and messy – the polishing coming later on’ … Emma Donaghue. Illustration: Alan Vest |
MY WRITING DAY
Emma Donoghue: ‘I have only from 8.30am to 3.30pm to work. It’s a very healthy discipline’
The author on her ‘regime’, research and adapting her work for the screenEmma Donoghue
Saturday 7 January 2017
W
hen I was a child I had some strange ideas about what being a writer entailed. My dad is a literary critic, who has written many more books than I have. He somehow fitted them all into his teaching life and so, apparently from nowhere, I would see boxes of books with his name on the spine turning up at the house every now and then. At the same time, I developed the theory that to be a famous writer meant you first had to die young, and then wait for your work be discovered years after your death. This was based on some weird conjunction of Emily Dickinson and Anne Frank, but it all meant that I never really saw writing as an ordinary job, and it didn’t help much when I started my career and began to treat writing as, more or less, an ordinary job.
My routine in the early years involved reading for an hour or two over breakfast before wondering if I felt like writing that day. That was before I had kids. They are now 12 and nine, and these days I put them on the school bus and run to my computer knowing I have only from 8.30am to 3.30pm to work. It’s a very healthy discipline, especially as within that time you also have to administer a career in terms of answering emails, making travel arrangements and the rest of it, so sometimes it can take a while to get to the actual writing.
When I do start to write I try not to worry too much about whether it is actually any good. The great thing is to get it on the page. In a first draft the prose is always very indecisive and messy, and I might put in four different adjectives with slashes between them because I’m not sure which one to use. If I’m writing on an aeroplane or a bus, I always tilt my screen away from the person beside me because I’d hate the idea that they would look at this pile of rubbish and ask if I really am an author. But a lot of writers become a bit inhibited by asking whether something is a beautiful sentence. I see it much more in craft terms, more like being a landscape gardener or a carpenter. The thing is to make a solid structure first knowing you can do the polishing later on. The one recent novelty to my regime has been a treadmill desk which means I now spend some of my time walking as I write. It hasn’t made the writing any better, or any worse, but it does mean I don’t have to fret about making time for the gym.
The main variation among my novels is not the writing but the research. Sometimes I stick closely to facts. Other times, as in my latest book The Wonder, I make up the story but the background is as historically accurate as possible, so I spend time checking whether a particular bird would have been in the Irish Midlands in 1859. There is a bigger difference between the practice of writing novels and screenplays. With a novel you have all the power and editors send elegant notes with polite suggestions (which nevertheless can be absolutely crucial). In TV and film they have all the power and you get rather crisp comments about a problem with page 37 which they expect you to fix immediately. I had a great experience filming Room with Lenny Abrahamson, and was allowed a say in everything. But I knew I didn’t have the final say, which is fine as long as you know that from the beginning.
By the time the kids do get home at 3.30pm I can find that my loyalty is still to the characters in my book and it’s hard to meet the needs of real human beings. I’m aware there is a selfishness to writing. But, like a football match, there can be some extra time if they pick up a book themselves. I will always have my laptop at tennis classes and will be typing at the back while the other parents are clapping at the front.
When I eventually do finish there is no celebratory drink. Even when I send off the final draft, if I have more time left that day I will start the next book. It’s not quite like Trollope, who supposedly could finish one novel at 4.45pm, and work on the next until his regular knocking-off time of 5pm, but I do very much admire that spirit. So I try to be as industrious and unpretentious about the process as I can and that would be my advice to any aspiring writers. I know if I was wedded to a special pen, or particular violins playing in the background, I’d have very few productive writing days in a year.
• Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder is published by Picador.
THE GUARDIAN
Obituaries /John Berger
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| John Berger |
John Berger obituary
Critic whose TV series Ways of Seeing posed questions about art and society, and a writer whose fiction reflected his life in rural France
Michael McNay
Monday 2 January 2017 21.37 GMT
The art critic, essayist and novelist John Berger threw down his challenge early in his television series Ways of Seeing. This came in 1972, the year when Berger, who has died aged 90, broke through to real fame from his niche celebrity on the arts pages of the New Statesman. Ways of Seeing, made on the cheap for the BBC as four half-hour programmes, was the first series of its kind since Civilisation (1969), 13 one-hour episodes for which Kenneth Clark, its writer and presenter, and a BBC production team had travelled 80,000 miles through 13 countries exploring 2,000 years of the visual culture of the western world. Berger travelled as far as the hut in Ealing, west London where his programmes were filmed, and no farther. What he said in his characteristic tone of sweet reasonableness was:
“In his book on the nude, Kenneth Clark says that being naked is simply being without clothes. The nude, according to him, is a form of art. I would put it differently: to be naked is to be oneself; to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to be a nude.”
Burt Reynolds / This much I Know / ‘Dumping a helicopter full of manure on the National Enquirer made me feel great’
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| Burt Reynolds |
This much I Know
Burt Reynolds: ‘Dumping a helicopter full of manure on the National Enquirer made me feel great’
The 80-year-old actor on being a pin-up, his fears about his friend Donald Trump and why he can’t stop speedingRuth Huntman
Saturday 7 January 2017
Dad never told me he loved me. He was a military man and a chief of police and didn’t display his feelings. If I was in the room when one of my movies came on, he’d get up and walk out. At the end of his life he did finally tell me he was proud of me and I thought: “Yep, I’ll take that.”
I’ve always regretted posing naked for Cosmopolitan. People didn’t get that I had such a conceited look because I was sending myself up. It was just before Deliverance was released and it ruined the film’s Oscar chances.
Dumping a helicopter full of horse shit on the National Enquirer made me feel great. They’d been writing crap about me for years so I thought it was only fitting. One Christmas Eve my pilot and I loaded my helicopter with manure from my ranch, flew over the building and watched it cascade down their giant Christmas tree.
Being called a sex symbol has always made me cringe. When you have that label your IQ drops way down in people’s eyes. I thought someday I’d be so old it wouldn’t worry me. But it still follows me round.
There were rumours I had Aids in the 80s after I broke my jaw on a film and lost loads of weight. I was treated like a leper in Hollywood and it was the worst time of my life. I sure found out who my real friends were and I wasn’t surprised by those who turned out to be real arses.
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| ‘Being called a sex symbol has always made me cringe’: Burt Reynolds. Photograph: Steve Schofield |
My biggest regret is not staying with Dinah Shore, the love of my life. We were soulmates, but my career was on fire and my ego was out of control. I was stupid and I didn’t think it would work because of the age gap and I was wrong. To this day it makes me sad. I’ve never found anyone like her.
Marlon Brando was an unbelievable arsehole. He hated me because of my resemblance to a younger him. When we met at a party he was rude and accused me of capitalising on looking like him. So I promised him I wouldn’t get fat.
I’d love to have become Bette Davis’s fifth husband. We were great pals and there was a mutual romantic attraction. We were at a function once when a guy asked her if I was her new conquest in front of me. She slapped him so hard the whole room went silent.
There’s been an element of self-sabotage in my career. I turned down Bond, and Jack Nicholson’s role in Terms of Endearment. Boogie Nights revived my career, but I tried really hard not to do it. But as long as the laughter continues it’s great with me.
The image of me as a womanising tough guy has dogged me all my life and hurt me a lot. And I still haven’t figured out what makes women tick.
I was terrified that my friend Donald Trump would ask me to be part of his presidential campaign. I’d have said no. I’m afraid now that he’s president we could get involved in a war very quickly. There’s a part of him that is so much fun and so sweet, but he’s doing what I used to do – having a good time being arrogant. And he has so many hangers-on.
Speeding is something I’ve done all my life. I just got a ticket yesterday. I still like really fast cars, unless I’m with a beautiful lady, then I prefer something very slow and quiet.
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THIS MUCH I KNOW
002 David Bailey / This much I know / Les is more. Except for sex
003 Peter Ustinov / This much I know / Children are close to the mystery of birth and old people are close to the mystery of death
003 Peter Ustinov / This much I know / Children are close to the mystery of birth and old people are close to the mystery of death
2004
2005
2006
Jane Birkin / This much I know / "I see the best qualities of my three husbands in each of my children" Tom Jones / I might have become a miner like my father
2007
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
Al Pacino / This much I know / ‘It’s never been about money. I was often unemployed’
Georgia May Jagger / ‘With modelling, sometimes you’re punky, other times girly and sweet’
Georgia May Jagger / ‘With modelling, sometimes you’re punky, other times girly and sweet’
2016
Miriam Margolyes / ‘I adore being Jewish but I’m not a believer in God’
Kathleen Hanna / ‘I'm a punk rock stripper with sexual abuse counsellor training’
Emma Donoghue / This much I know / ‘I’ve ended up having a family as well as being a lesbian’
Kathleen Hanna / ‘I'm a punk rock stripper with sexual abuse counsellor training’
Emma Donoghue / This much I know / ‘I’ve ended up having a family as well as being a lesbian’
Jessica Alba / This mucho I know / ‘With this new film I wanted to kick some butt again’
Courtney Barnett / ‘When I go into a house I have to look in all the cupboards’
Courtney Barnett / ‘When I go into a house I have to look in all the cupboards’
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