The link below is to an article that takes a look at the current fad of colouring books.
For more visit:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/indiereader/coloring-books-not-just-f_b_8591800.html
Weeding in the Library
The link below is to an article that looks at how to weed your personal library.
For more visit:
http://bookriot.com/2015/11/19/how-to-weed-your-bookshelves/
Book review: The Latham Diaries, ten years on
Natalie Mast, University of Western Australia
In September 2005, Melbourne University Press (MUP) published former Labor opposition leader Mark Latham’s personal diaries, covering the 11-year period he served in parliament. The book turned Latham, who resigned as leader and from parliament in January that year, into a pariah in the ALP’s eyes.
In the book, Latham does not hold back on his opinions of caucus colleagues, factional leaders, union heavyweights, business elites and journalists. The book caused a sensation. It not only included Latham’s own views, but recounted comments from other Labor caucus members and party figures, many of which were scathing.
Sales-wise, The Latham Diaries was a huge success. MUP ordered a second print run before the book had even been released.
I first read the book in 2005. The book does contain vitriolic insults about political figures of the day. But what struck me then and has remained with me was that The Latham Diaries provided an excellent discussion of the parliamentary Labor Party in the wilderness years post-Paul Keating.
Given that the book was released so soon after Latham quit parliament, I decided a re-reading was warranted in order to determine how well the book had aged and if there were larger lessons that could be taken from it a decade on.
An outsider within caucus
From the time he was a backbencher in the Keating government through to his stint as leader, entries in the book often end with Latham declaring himself the outsider. Latham views himself as a lone operator who often finds only Keating and Gough Whitlam agreeing with his position and encouraging him to keep up “the good fight”.
Within the book Latham is a “true believer”, battling against the ALP’s machine men. But his view of Labor and what it stands for is a romanticised one.
Latham looks back with rose-coloured glasses to mythical glory days, when a purer ALP was committed to improving the lives of working-class Australians. He forgets the splits and factionalism that are just as much a part of ALP history as the campaigns for a minimum wage and universal health care.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
Rejection of the old
Latham despairs at Labor’s rejection of the legacy of the Hawke-Keating economic reforms. He claims that the ALP under Kim Beazley’s leadership was so eager to distance itself from the Hawke-Keating era that no-one – including Beazley – seemed to know what the party stood for.
For Latham, the wilderness years of opposition were unbearable. He is utterly contemptuous of Beazley’s attempts to gain government:
After six years of Beazley’s small-target strategy, we face an identity crisis. The True Believers don’t know what we stand for and the swinging voters have stopped trying to find out.
Latham’s view was that the ALP should gain government because of the appeal of its policies, rather than strategic targeting and poll-driven responses to issues of the day.
Out of step with his party
One of the most interesting things about Latham is that his passion for economic reform – including reduction of tariffs, fiscal accountability, winding up generational reliance on welfare – and his belief in social capital was at the forefront of social democratic thinking in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
While the ALP was busy distancing itself from the economic reforms of the Hawke-Keating era, many social democrats in Europe and the US were using the reforms as a successful example of “Third Way” thinking. Latham was one of the leading advocates of Third Way politics in Australia during this period and published on the topic.
The Latham Diaries provides an insight into Latham’s views on where the ALP should be heading. While interested in the stories and lessons told by Keating and Whitlam, for Latham the real excitement is always in the future:
That’s the difference between us. I see a problem in the public arena and think: how do I solve it and explain the solution to people? Beazley sees a problem and thinks: how do I analyse it and exploit it?
Latham’s other area of concern focuses on his view that there is a social capital deficit in Australia which not only has a negative impact on political engagement, but also on the way in which we all live our lives. Latham regrets the lack of community that seems to pervade the sprawling Australian suburbs.
ALP factionalism
Throughout the book, it is clear that Latham understands how the factional system of the ALP works:
My belief in adventurism means that I will always have an uneasy relationship with the NSW Right … I joined the Right in the mid-1980s for pragmatic reasons: in a two-faction state you had to join one of them to have any hope of preselection.
The faction, however, is based on a culture of anti-intellectualism. Policy is made through a series of deals rather than the public interest.
Latham’s own behaviour is at times partly driven as a response to the factional system:
Simon Crean’s leadership came under pressure from the factional and union interests opposed to organisational reform … I resolved to remain loyal to his leadership, mainly on principle but also out of self-interest, as this assisted my rehabilitation in caucus after three years on the backbench.
Like many former members of caucus, upon leaving parliament Latham reveals a hatred of the factional system and the rise of machine men controlling the party. His disdain for the “three roosters” – Stephen Smith, Wayne Swan and Stephen Conroy – is evident in many of the entries:
These roosters have not learned anything from the leadership debacle. They are small-minded troublemakers and white-anters who would love to see me fall over to hurt Crean – two for the price of one.
AAP/Alan Porritt
The relationship between the press and caucus
The contempt Latham has for the press gains momentum throughout the book. In particular, Latham targets:
… the three gallery journalists who have run a ten-year critique on me are Oakes (Jabba), Grattan and Milne (the Dwarf).
Latham despises the culture of leaking among his colleagues. He quotes a June 2003 speech he gave supporting Simon Crean’s leadership:
If the push against our leader were to succeed, it would set a shocking precedent. This long campaign of leaking, backgrounding and sabotage would be legitimised within the ALP.
Following Crean’s departure as opposition leader, Latham assumes the role and tries to deal with the leaking within caucus:
I’ve had my suspicions for some time now that Rudd has been feeding material to Oakes. Decided to set him up, telling Kevvie about our focus groups on Iraq. No such research exists … Today right on cue Jabba has written in The Bulletin.
Post-2004 election fallout
Latham’s angst at the sacrifice of time with his family for his political career is genuine. He and his second wife, Janine, discussed whether or not he should continue in the role:
What can I do now? Three more years in this rotten job, three more years staring across the chamber at a Tory government … It’s tempting to pull the pin.
Having decided to remain as opposition leader, at the end of 2004 Latham suffered a second attack of pancreatitis, which he thinks was most likely a result of radiotherapy treatment he received for his cancer:
It’s all turned to seed: pancreatitis, time away from home, loss of privacy, impact on family, so many ficklers in politics, disdain for the media and the whingeing, gossiping, sickening caucus … that thing they call the Labor Party.
The relief Latham feels at his escape from the rigours of political life is evident.
Lasting lessons
While the book ends with Latham happy at being able to spend time with his family and regain his privacy, the reader is left with one over-arching question: how do we fix this problem?
Latham described an Australia where the country’s main reform party rejected its economic credentials, played small-target politics and refused to engage in the major debate on political philosophy of the late 20th century.
Ten years on, many of the complaints Latham made about the workings of Australia’s parliamentary system have moved from the secret inner sanctum of Canberra to everyday news events:
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In-depth policy debate appears to be a thing of the past as politicians from both sides simply repeat the slogan of the day at whatever event they happen to be at.
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Leadership issues quickly come to dominate the news cycle.
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Leaking dominates the political environment. A mixture of disgruntled MPs seeking retribution and the ambitious looking to make friends in the press gallery provides the daily fodder that now dominates political coverage.
The flaws in our political system that Latham highlighted continue to affect us. Australia remains a poorer nation as a result. Ultimately, The Latham Diaries remains a seminal piece – not only having revealed the ALP’s inner workings, but having highlighted policy issues and structural problems that continue to be of concern a decade on.
Natalie Mast, Associate Director, Research Data & Strategy, University of Western Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Ghost writing: The Girl in The Spider’s Web and other resurrections
Stewart King, Monash University
Crime fiction series are enormously popular, with readers, authors and publishers. An established series develops characters and locations, builds audiences – and generates revenue.
Certain series become synonymous with their authors’ names, as anyone who’s ever sat down with a Christie can tell you. But what happens when the author of a beloved series dies?
Author Stieg Larsson passed away before his (completed) Millennium trilogy was published. Now a fourth Millennium book, The Girl in the Spider’s Web (2015), written by David Lagercrantz, has been published.
Readers get new adventures of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, and publishers hope to repeat the commercial success of the estimated 80 million sales of the original novels worldwide.
Larsson’s series is not the only one to be brought back to life this year. British author Sophie Hannah penned the first Hercule Poirot novel – The Monogram Murders (2014) – since Agatha Christie died in 1976, and Anthony Horowitz wrote the latest addition to James Bond’s post-Ian Fleming career: Trigger Mortis (2015).
Resurrecting characters and series has a long history. Due to pressure from readers, Arthur Conan Doyle famously revived Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes Returns (1903), eight years after killing him off in The Final Problem (1893).
The final Holmes story written by Doyle appeared in 1927, thus satisfying readers’ demands for Holmes’s adventures for a further 24 years. Holmes, of course, has outlived his creator, with multiple rewrites and TV and film adaptations.
Finding an author’s voice
For English readers, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, the English translation of Det som inte dödar oss (That which does not kill us), introduces two major changes.
First, we have a new author, David Lagercrantz, who has previously published a novel based on the life of English code-breaker Alan Turing, and ghost-written a much praised autobiography of Swedish footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
Second, the series has a new translator. Reg Keeland has been replaced with George Goulding, who translated Lagercrantz’s Turing novel.
Translators are often ignored, but changing them is no minor matter, as the Swedish original is mediated through the skill and ability of the translator. While Lagercrantz, to a certain degree, has to ventriloquise Larsson, Goulding has to imitate both Lagercrantz and the earlier Keeland translations.
When a popular fiction writer achieves great commercial success, often through some innovation, there are inevitably imitators who seek to cash in on this success.
(Think of the slew of forensic investigators who appeared after Patricia Cornwall’s Kay Scarpetta shot to fame.)
Is David Lagercrantz little more than a Stieg Larsson imitator? If he is, he is an imitator who has the advantage of being able to use the original characters.
Lagercrantz would argue that he is both imitator and innovator. In an interview with The Guardian he said:
I had to be faithful to Larsson’s work, but I also had to be true to myself.
One such area is violence. Lagercrantz downplays Larsson’s graphic, quite confronting violence in favour of the “intellectual thrillers” he prefers.
Critics have generally been positive in their reviews of The Girl in the Spider’s Web. They’ve praised the tighter focus of the writing and described it as:
a respectful and affectionate homage to the originals.
The creative essence
Readers may be happy to meet Blomkvist and Salander again, but Larsson’s vision was much broader than the very memorable characters he created. While perhaps true to the original at the level of character and writing, Lagercrantz’s novel misses the target of left-winger Larsson’s criticism.
In the Millennium trilogy, Larsson attacks Swedish racism, rampant capitalism, entrenched misogyny and violence against women, the nation’s conservatism and reluctance to acknowledge its pro-Nazi sympathies, and the institutional abuse of individual citizens, such as Lisbeth Salander.
Wen Zeng/Flickr, CC BY
Lagercrantz continues Larsson’s left-wing criticism. But there is a major difference. The Swedish national focus of the Millennium trilogy is, in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, distinctly international. This is not necessarily problematic in itself, but in doing so, Lagercrantz pens just another well-written and entertaining international conspiracy novel.
Indeed, The Girl in the Spider’s Web could be part of the Bond franchise. The bureaucratic, banal, but nevertheless evil, villains of the Millennium trilogy were recognisable. They were individuals who overstepped the mark and abused their power or privilege. Here, they are replaced with a Bond-like super-villain whose main aim is to destroy Salander.
Motivations, once political, are now very personal. Evil is no longer specific, localised; it exists elsewhere. The original novels’ social criticism and call to be vigilant against the multiple incursions of the state – specifically Sweden, but ideologically any state – in the lives of its citizens, is displaced into the world of shadowy international conspiracies.
Lisbeth Salander was always larger than life, but she was believable. Lagercrantz offers us a world of comic-book characters.
The Cervantes clapback
Shortly before finishing the second volume of the adventures of Don Quixote, Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes discovered that another author had pilfered his characters.
Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, the pseudonym of an author whose identity is still unknown, continued the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in his own novel, introducing numerous changes.
Cervantes was justifiably enraged and, when he published the second volume in 1615, he returned the favour, incorporating minor characters from the false Quixote. In a humorous twist, Cervantes has them sign statutory declarations confirming that the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza they had previously met were pale imitations of the real Don and his squire. Cervantes had his revenge.
One wonders what Stieg Larsson would do if he had the chance.
Stewart King, Senior Lecturer, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Not My Review: Cool Shades, by Vanessa Brown
The link below is to a book review of ‘Cool Shades – The History and Meaning of Sunglasses,’ by Vanessa Brown.
For more visit:
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2015/11/20/book-review-cool-shades-the-history-and-meaning-of-sunglasses-by-vanessa-brown/
Dust Jackets
The link below is to an article that takes a look at dust jackets and their ‘value.’
For more visit:
http://bookriot.com/2015/11/18/complicated-relationship-dust-jacket/
Speed Reading
Covers
Book review: Selling Apartheid – South Africa’s Global Propaganda War
Peter Vale, University of Johannesburg
In the face of mounting of international disapprobation, how did white rule in South Africa sustain itself?
Ron Nixon tries to answer this question in Selling Apartheid – South Africa’s Global Propaganda War. He is a Washington correspondent of the New York Times and an associate of the department of Media and Journalism Studies at Wits University. Unfortunately, his book disappoints.
As the title suggests, Nixon believes that apartheid South Africa “sold” – rather than “told” – its story to the world. His narrative draws from three sources: published work, several interviews, and a peek into (mainly) American archives. His technique is the case study.
So he uses the exemplar case of apartheid’s “unorthodox diplomacy” – the well-documented Muldergate scandal of the 1970s. Its infamy was heightened by the fierce interdepartmental rivalry it generated. It also ended the careers of the then-prime minister, John Vorster, and Connie Mulder, the influential information minister. Mulder was considered to be next in line for the top job.
The conspiracy aimed to buy newspapers in the US with taxpayers’ money. Through these, apartheid’s cause would be promoted in an America in which the issue of human rights was increasingly drawn towards the foreign policy debate. South Africa aimed to tap into a counter-narrative that eventually led to the Reagan presidency, the rise of free market economics, and the “second” Cold War.
As Nixon points out several times, the events that culminated in Muldergate were spearheaded by a 30-something former journalist and sometime government information officer. His name was Eschel Rhoodie, a controversial character in any book.
Dubious characters peddling apartheid
The Paper Curtain, a polemic Eschel Rhoodie wrote, seemingly was the text that enabled South Africa’s traditional diplomacy, modelled on formal state-to-state practice, to change into a policy of buying influence in high places in Washington and other Western capitals.
When the Muldergate ruse was exposed, Rhoodie fled and purported sightings of him came to overshadow the scandal itself. Intrepid South African pressmen finally tracked him down in Ecuador. The occasion was marked by a photograph of him feeding a llama, on the front page of the then-Rand Daily Mail.
Nixon has used the seminal account of Muldergate, written by journalists Mervyn Rees and Chris Day, as the basis for his version of the story. So, on the Muldergate case, there’s very little new in the book.
In presenting another case, Nixon turns to another contentious character – Max Yergan, a Black American activist who arrived in South Africa in 1922 to pursue a career in the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA).
Posted to Alice, in the Eastern Cape, Yergan became close to many who would play a role in South Africa’s liberation – John Tengo Jabavu, John Langalilele Dube, Alfred Xuma, ZK Matthews and Govan Mbeki.
Ostensibly monitored by the state’s security apparatus, Yergan gradually lost his faith in Christianity (and in the work of the YMCA) as a force for liberation. During a visit the Soviet Union in 1934, he embraced Marxism. Unsurprisingly, his South African friends found him a “changed” man when he returned to this country.
Three years later, and back in the US, he set up (and served) on various bodies that were the precursor to the worldwide anti-apartheid movement. In these spaces, Yergan rubbed shoulders with legends of Black American culture and politics: actor Paul Robeson, Nobel Laureate Ralph J.Bunche, and pan-African intellectual W.E.B du Bois.
But Yergan’s political star was to crash, as the Cold War took hold, in a brutal argument with Robeson. This conflict drove Yergan back towards South Africa in the form of a newly found anti-communism. This was the official Cold War position of the government in Pretoria that he had once so strongly opposed.
In the 1940s Yergan made several visits to South Africa that were cleared by the FBI and sanctioned by the white government. During the course of these, Yergan and his fierce anti-communist views were spurned by the African National Congress, South Africa’s liberation movement, and by the South African Communist Party.
The Star
If efforts by white power to directly buy influence in the world – as in the Rhoodie instance – is one case in Nixon’s book, another – represented by the Yergan example – was the failure of Black Americans to understand that they too could be tricked by the persuasive power of the white purse.
Where books fails and succeeds
But – and this is a failure of the book intellectually – the comparative value of these two cases, and others of similar ilk in the book, is of limited value. They are not thought through.
Nixon is strongest, empirically, when he is working the Washington patch: his access to individuals and to archival sources has brought several fresh issues to the fore. That said, he is weak on American policy towards apartheid South Africa and how this issue was linked to decolonisation in the subcontinent.
So, the important role of Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Richard Nixon, in the making of America’s African policy is poorly considered. When he was US national security advisor, Kissinger was responsible for what was famously called the “Tar Baby” option – America’s policy tilt to governments in Africa’s “white South” and intentionally away from the majority-ruled countries.
This move, more than any other factor, opened the way for Vorster’s government to “sell” its wares to the US and – as Nixon also claims – to its European Cold War allies. Unfortunately, as the focus moves towards these places, the empirical evidence weakens, and speculation drives the story.
Let’s be clear: there is no doubt that successive apartheid governments spent millions (and much energy) cosying up to political parties (and the great-and-good that support them) in the UK, and in Europe. But the deep evidence for this, as presented in these pages, is a thin, thin reed.
There is an important and interesting book to be written on the apartheid’s efforts to peddle its story through unorthodox diplomacy, but this is not it.
Peter Vale, Director, Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Does ‘translating’ Shakespeare into modern English diminish its greatness?
Sheila T Cavanagh, Emory University
An uproar ensued after it was reported that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) – southern Oregon’s 80-year-old annual theatrical extravaganza – would be commissioning playwrights to “translate” all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English.
The project drew jeers from Shakespearean professors, arts practitioners and others who believe passionately in the power of Shakespeare’s original texts, who abhor any attempt to “dumb down” their language.
OSF Director of Literary Development and Dramaturgy Lue Douthit and OSF Artistic Director Bill Rauch maintain that OSF is undertaking a bold, not sacrilegious, experiment. Nevertheless, howls of outrage have followed what Douhit ruefully has deemed a “career-ending” announcement for those involved.
As an educator and lover of Shakespearean drama, I remain committed to the value of presenting Shakespeare’s plays in their original language. I require my students to read Shakespeare’s plays in their original form, and through my work on the World Shakespeare Project, I’ve witnessed undergraduates in places such as Uganda, rural India and Buenos Aires enthusiastically respond to the challenge.
Yet the outrage over the OSF’s new modernization project is misguided. The organization – which is known for experimentation – is simply participating in larger, centuries-long tradition of molding, melding and adapting Shakespeare’s original texts.
Shakespeare for dummies?
Among those criticizing the new project is Columbia University Professor James Shapiro, a prominent Shakespearean scholar who maintains that “by changing the language in this modernizing way…it just doesn’t pack the punch and the excitement and the intoxicating quality of [the original] language.”
Earlier this month, before an audience at Shakespeare’s Globe, he added, “It’s a really bad idea.”
Notably, however, Shapiro (along with many others) responded quite differently to the translation of a different classic text. On Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s oft-praised 1999 rewriting of Beowulf, Shapiro wrote in The New York Times:
Examples like this add up to a translation that manages to accomplish what before now had seemed impossible: a faithful rendering that is simultaneously an original and gripping poem in its own right.
In this instance, at least, Heaney’s talent apparently overcame Shapiro’s objections to the concept.
The playwrights the company has commissioned to “modernize” the language of Shakespeare’s works may or may not achieve the majesty attributed to Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf. But for whatever reason, changing the language of Shakespeare remains an anathema, while the setting, costuming and theoretical conceptualization of his plays are fair game for innovation.
The hottest theater ticket in Britain at the moment, for example, is Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet, which caused similar outrage for opening with the famous “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy, rather than the traditional “Who’s there?.” By the end of previews, the speech was moved back to (one of) the places it traditionally resides. Cumberbatch’s audiences have been comparatively silent, however, about the production’s addition of modern props, like a phonograph player.
London’s Young Vic Theatre, meanwhile, is currently presenting a strong version of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, with a set filled with dozens of naked, anatomically correct, inflatable dolls. Like the phonograph player on the set of Hamlet, it’s unlikely that theatergoers will object to the dolls, nor will they protest the video screens employed during the performance.
But when it comes to changing the language – well, the main objection, it appears, stems from concerns that it will encourage series such as Shakespeare for Dummies or No Fear Shakespeare, which presents original Shakespearean text adjacent to what its editors call “the kind of English people actually speak today.”
Such projects are understandable, if worrisome. Shakespeare does have a reputation for being too dense for ordinary people to easily comprehend.
At the same time, there are many remarkable projects that bring Shakespeare’s plays to even the most unconventional audiences. There’s Curt Tofteland’s Shakespeare Behind Bars, which offers prisoners the opportunities to present full-length Shakespeare plays, while former Royal Shakespeare Company artist Kelly Hunter’s project Shakespeare’s Heartbeat uses Shakespearean drama as the basis for games designed for children with autism.
Play on!
It’s worth noting the OSF is not planning to replace Shakespeare’s original texts during its current presentation of the complete Shakespearean canon, which will take place over the next decade.
While the company hopes that the newly commissioned versions of Shakespeare will be performed in Oregon and elsewhere, they also retain their commitment to presenting the conventional texts, albeit with regular tweaks and cuts.
As Shapiro and many others admit, Shakespearean drama has been altered, rewritten and reimagined repeatedly since the plays were first presented during the reigns of Elizabeth Tudor and James Stuart.
Dylan Martinez/Reuters
During the English Restoration, King Lear was given a happy ending. More recently, the 2001 film Scotland, Pa. offered a modern retelling of Macbeth, set at a fast food restaurant. Henry IV found itself placed among male prostitutes in Oregon in Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film My Own Private Idaho. Even Justin Kurzel’s acclaimed new film Macbeth opens with a twist: the funeral of Macbeth’s toddler.
The best adaptations – West Side Story, the musical Kiss Me, Kate and the Japanese film Throne of Blood – thrive. The bad, silly and unfortunate – Romeo and Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss and Animal Planet’s Romeo and Juliet: A Monkey’s Tale – fall by the wayside.
As poet Andrew Marvell might say, there is “world enough and time” for any number of Shakespearean adaptations and iterations.
While Shakespeare’s original language is remarkably rich and compelling, like Cleopatra, “age will not wither it.” Neither will OSF’s revisionary experimentation.
Sheila T Cavanagh, Professor of English, Emory University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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