"The Verb"

[Lateralthinking1]

The review of last week's programme is now at post 44 above. The programme can still be heard on the I-Player and is available until Friday night. Recommended.

[Lateralthinking1]

The contributors to this edition were all solid enough, with undoubted appeal, but none of them were writers who I would necessarily choose. For many years now, Philip Ridley has shown that being from the East End of London isn't incompatible with having an artistic sensibility. The sheer range of his output is extraordinary. He has written books for adults and children as well as plays for radio and the theatre and film scripts, most notably perhaps the one for "The Krays". Additionally, there have been many photography and art exhibitions and even songs, all different and yet of a certain characteristic style. It isn't difficult to identify a work by Ridley. Expect the lurid and the fantastical with pop art leanings, elements of controversy and frequently an undertow of violence. It has to be said that this is not the stuff to which I warm, just as I never took to William Blake or William S Burroughs. The trailer for his latest project, "Tender Napalm", sums it up sufficiently - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-r6k35eouc.



Photo: Philip Ridley

While Ridley spoke about that piece on the programme - it is about a relationship between a man and a woman in a dystopian paradise - the two poems he read were more measured, albeit typically idiosyncratic. They are among those included at the end of his latest book. To the extent that it is possible to summarise them, "The Silver Hat" appeared to be an emblem for being in love and the worry about losing that state. "The Prince and the Snail" was more about love at its all-consuming. Although the subject of the latter was very different from that of the recent short story by Ben Okri, it was not a million miles away from it in terms of its shifting juxtaposition of sizes and perspectives. In Okri's story, there was a dolls house inside a town house in a city. In Ridley's poem, there was a snail inside a pocket of a man who Jonah like ended up inside a whale. The two pieces were also quite similar in tone - somewhere in the areas of mysticism, fable and fairy tale - although there can be a whimsy in Ridley which, on the occasions it appears, tends to lighten the demons evident in his other work. It was all ok enough but far from spellbinding.

Sarah Hall was nominated for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for her second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, which opens on the windswept front of Morecambe Bay and focuses on love, loss and the art of tattooing. Two of her other novels, "How to Paint a Dead Man" and "The Carhullan Army", have also been critically acclaimed. She wrote and presented this week's short story, "Lido", which shared with Ridley a matter-of-fact dialogue but differed by being set in the very down-to-earth everyday. Perhaps that would be better phrased "down-to-water" for there is considerable swim in the chance encounter of a woman and a man in a city meadow. Neither has fully expected to meet again there and neither knows exactly what to say. In the awkward, rather staccato, exchange, it is the immediate terrain that becomes fluid. The very ground on which their lives have been steady, if not being formed on the deepest foundations, momentarily ripples and there is the heavy hint of its capacity to flood.



Photo: Sarah Hall

One wonders whether the woman in particular is not waving but drowning. She has been to the lido. For her, it is a place of sanctuary. He is about to go there, courtesy of a ticket that she rushes to give to him. She wants him to go and yet she wants him to stay. She tells him that she is married now but lies when she says that she doesn't have a child. Why? One is left with several unanswered questions and this is precisely Hall's objective. Behind the clipped, realistic, discourse is what she describes as shadow psychology. What we do know is that they will keep in their own lanes for there is risk in the possibility of diving. Each will probably remain afloat just about. While the story worked well, I had the sense that we were not, in literature terms, on unfamiliar ground. There might, though, have been a point there and one deliberately created by the author. It replicated the thoughts of the characters themselves for their paths had crossed before for longer and indeed more deeply as they might have done in a novel.

The Goodbye Library is a part of this year's programme of the annual London Word Festival. Taking place on 27th April at The Nave in St Paul's Road, Stoke Newington, it is a ‘light-hearted lament for the library’, with readings, songs and poetry. Emmy the Great and Jack Underwood were on "The Verb" to promote the event and they will be among the participants on the day, mining the Dewey Decimal classification system and waltzing through ten sections of their 000-999. All of the contributors described what local libraries meant to them, particularly when younger. Interestingly "safety" was mentioned a couple of times along with enlightenment and the contradictory feelings of solace and being a part of a community. A couple had humourous memories, far from an obvious association. It was also noted how the way in which books were ordered alphabetically and numerically could lead to different avenues of research from those provided by the internet. Surprisingly, organisational systems could open new windows because a wide range of topics had to be accommodated in a small number of categories, thereby encouraging haphazard, bizarre and often fascinating discoveries. Where else would you move, for example, from a book on hygiene to the Koran?



Photo: Emmy the Great

To celebrate "Mind, Body and Spirit", Emmy sang a song based on the book by Marina Warner, "Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary". Jack tackled "Business" in a poem which contrasted the languages of money and art. Both pieces were decent enough. Emmy is clearly a talented young singer-songwriter who has established a significant cult following but I cannot say that I have been fully won over to her yet. I think she is still finding her niche. And while there is certainly a place for this kind of initiative set against the assault on culture reasoned by the need to cut costs, too much of it would trivialise what is essentially a war on wanton destruction. Here are the websites for Public Libraries News - http://www.publiclibrariesnews.blogspot.com/ - and Alan Gibbons - http://alangibbons.net/ - both of which provide regular updates on the national campaign against library closures.

I doubt that it hasn't dawned on the reader that this country is divided into two now. There are those who race about as if they are more important than any other living being and that their own lives will be coming to an end within a matter of seconds. The second group of people muse on the madness of it all or else they sit bleakly contemplating that they might as well be waiting for Godot. In a very experimental novel, "Godot-on-Sea", John Schad takes the absurdist play by Samuel Beckett to Blackpool or, to be more precise, introduces us to the 1956 production at The Grand Theatre and the actors who, frankly, died there. As the local newspapers gleefully recounted, many in the audience walked out while the remainder stayed in their seats principally to jeer. Never exactly a peoples' play - among many other things, it has been scrutinised using Freudian and Jungian analysis - Schad's book is hugely ambitious not only in its subject matter but in its objective of providing a range of new perspectives.



Photo: John Schad

Stuck in a boarding house bedroom on the morning after the disaster, the actors who are Lucky and his master Pozzo, are not merely neurotic but drift in and out of their own personalities and their roles. Even aspects of the room become absurd and it is as if they inhabit an entirely different world to everyone else. However, as Schad was to rediscover in his research for the book, the truth is often stranger than fiction. At around the same time, one of the many peculiar phenomena in Blackpool was the concept of the "starving brides". A month before their wedding, engaged couples would sit in separate glass cages and literally starve. Passers by would give them money for the entertainment. That Blackpool has never exactly chosen to trade in normalcy throws a different kind of spotlight on an audience who found "Godot" just simply too weird. Potentially "Godot-on-Sea" has something to say about virtually everything but it might just teach us most about the hysteria in popular culture. Intriguing if rather heavyweight stuff.

[Lateralthinking1]

Friday 22 April 2011

"The purely agitational attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject" - Jawaharlal Nehru

"There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it" - George Bernard Shaw

The details of this week's programme:

(Not all the links and extracts are discussed in the programme. They are included to provide an introduction to, or reminder of, those featured.)

Ian McMillan offers the best writing around in Radio 3's language cabaret:

With the novelist Justin Cartwright who reads and discusses a new piece commissioned by The Verb.

To Heaven By Water - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrmvK...eature=related

Children's laureate Anthony Browne discusses marrying words and pictures in his books for children.

Why Picture Books Are Important - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AaV9...eature=related

Bella Hardy performs material from her new album Songs Lost and Stolen.

The Maying Song - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZpylwVzqTA

And, Arto Vaun introduces contemporary Armenian poetry in the shadow of the Armenian Genocide of 1915.

Capillarity - http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/in...=9781857549911

The Verb - This Friday, 9.15pm-10pm, Radio 3

Also available for 7 days on BBC I-Player

[Lateralthinking1]

A two-part review of this edition of the programme will be at posts 55 and 56.

[amateur51]

Good to have you back, Lateral - hope you've been enjoying the weather

[Lateralthinking1]

Thank you amateur51. I have been in my garden planting vegetables and took a trip out to the bluebell wood. I wish you a peaceful Easter. Lateralthinking1.

[amateur51]

Thank you amateur51. I have been in my garden planting vegetables and took a trip out to the bluebell wood. I wish you a peaceful Easter. Lateralthinking1.

I understand that it's a stonking year for bluebells - how wonderful! I used to up to Herefordshire at this time of year for week when I was working and one of the highlights was walking through the near-silent bluebell woods.

I must take a walk in some local countryside & see for myself

[Lateralthinking1]

It is pretty good for the bluebells but the dry conditions aren't helping them. If you do go, it would be best to do it in the next two or three days. The rhododendrons are already looking good - spring began late but it feels like summer has come early. I just feel entirely different away from city crowds and traffic noise - always have done - and hope to get about more in the coming months. I will probably post some observations on stormy weather or virtual gardens. In the meantime, I hope you manage to do a nice walk in the countryside during this period. Tuesday is always good because it is just after the holiday.

[Lateralthinking1]

Friday 29 April 2011





OPEN THIS LINK!! - http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/0...elon_large.jpg








IGNORE THIS ONE! - http://www.chem.ucla.edu/harding/IGOC/W/wavy_line02.jpg

[Lateralthinking1]

Review of "The Verb" - 22 April 2011 - Part 1

In this week's edition, Ian interviewed Anthony Browne who became the childrens' laureate when Michael Rosen stepped down. Browne, who began as an illustrator, has been writing for children since the mid-seventies and he has published 40 books, many of which have been translated into many languages. Specifically, his picture books have become famous for their slightly challenging themes and brilliantly realised, surreal illustrations. In "Willy the Wimp", there is a chimpanzee who wants to be a chippendale. "A Walk in the Park" features trees that have feet and a man who takes a tomato for a stroll. Browne has said that he is using his two-year stint as laureate to focus on the appreciation of picture books and his latest publication, "Playing the Shape Game", is a memoir tracing his life both in words and in pictures. In the programme, he described the process of developing the ideas for his books as like remembering a dream or planning a film. He agreed with Ian that the skill required for writing the pared down language needed for a picture book was often underestimated. However, those who produce books without words have a more difficult task for how, he asked, can someone impress an editor simply by just presenting pictures?



Photo: Anthony Browne - El Libro de los Cerdos

Browne has had his critics. Ellen Handler Spitz criticized "Willy the Wimp" for having a macho ideology and a racist presentation of stereotypes of African-American children who, she said, were designated as the villains in the book. She reached this conclusion despite the fact that no human children, African-American or otherwise, are featured in the book. Writing about his retelling of "Hansel and Gretel" in the Times Literary Supplement, Tanya Harrod observed, "What … do we make of this contemporary stepmother's squalid dressing table with lipsticks, talcum powder and cigarette ends lovingly depicted by Anthony Browne? Is her taste for fake furs and stiletto heels the cause of the family's poverty? Why have the Social Services let them slip through the net? I really cannot envision buying any child this book." Perhaps if she had tried to have envisage rather than envision, she would have seen the context for Browne's work. He has a strong eye for compassion and social justice. There is humour with that humanity. In their slightly strange combination of fantasy and reality, his books sit very comfortably in the long history of children's literature.

He is also quietly groundbreaking. During the discussion, he went on to explain his interest in the gaps and connections between words and pictures. In his view, the worst kinds of picture books are the ones in which the pictures are merely illustrations to the words or the words are just captions to the pictures. He believes that it is best to provide a creative space to be filled by the reader. A storybook is only ever half the story. The adult reads the words while the child reads the pictures. The rest of the story is in the connection of dialogue between adult and child. While this viewpoint is, without question, entirely plausible - it works in purely literary terms and it rings true from personal experience - I do think that there is a proviso here. Recent academic studies have indicated that it is the hearing sense that is developed first and more fully. While by age three or four, most children have learnt a basic understanding of sound, it is now argued that visual comprehension is still being assimilated by the average seven year old. This is not necessarily to detract from the assumptions upon which the books of Browne are based - language is not the same as sound - but it does suggest that his work, and how it is enjoyed, could usefully be taken to a higher level of research.



Photo: Arto Vaun - Capillarity

"Capillarity" by Arto Vaun was a sequence of 66 poems which, while looking back to Walt Whitman, conjured Vaun's parents' Armenian background and his own experiences of growing up in the United States. As he explained in the programme, he is equally at ease being an American and an Armenian and yet not at all comfortable with being either. He read "Atlas Vertigo", one of his own poems which was about his grandfather who, no longer living in Armenia, would study an atlas daily to remind himself of his country's geography. Mostly, though, Vaun discussed his latest project in which he has been researching contemporary Armenian poets and translating their poetry into English. Specifically, he has been considering how that culture has been affected by the Armenian genocide of 1915 when 1.5 million Armenians were annihilated. One might have expected reticence in the aftermath. Poetry has a significant role in the culture of Armenia, just as it has in Galicia, but unlike the latter it has rarely accommodated modernism. Rather it is seen as a cultural ambassador for the country, its history and the church. However, almost immediately, there was a vibrant movement of poets in Paris, all survivors in exile, who opposed manifestos about national identity and embraced the tumultuous present. Only after the second world war was there any return to an overtly romanticised nationalism, and then the centre was Beirut. Vaun read a quite beautiful poem entitled "Migrant 1939" by one of the dissenters, Nicholas Sarafian:

"After the manic pace of immense cities and awakening from their illusions, I found the home where I had been a child..quiet in the whiteness..there were no tears, no joy, a love of struggle had killed tranquility..there was only art now in the place of lament".

[Lateralthinking1]

Review of "The Verb" - 22 April 2011 - Part 2

Justin Cartwright, a realist, was once appointed an MBE for his production and management of election broadcasts, first for the Liberal Party and then the SDP-Liberal Alliance during the 1979, 1983 and 1987 elections. Since then, he has won the Whitbread Novel Award, the Hawthornden Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize as well as being shortlisted for the Booker. His subjects have been wide-ranging, from the messiness and contingency of modern family life in "To Heaven By Water" to the farce of the banking crisis in "Other People's Money". He accepts that much of his writing is semi-autobiographical. His short story on "The Verb", entitled "Superman and Me", was set in his native South Africa and was told by the main character, a boy who at the age of five had lost his parents because of a car crash. Having been sent to live with severe grandparents, he had found some solace in an attic where he escaped into a world of imagination. The piece was very striking for making the boy so real. His voice was completely believable, displaying both his burden of confusion and the safety negotiated through his attention to detail. The story echoed with emotional resonance, being crammed with splashes of colour. The imagery of childhood may have populated the confinement of his unenviable conditions but it was also precisely the link between him and more fortunate children.



Photo: Justin Cartwright - To Heaven By Water

There were several references in the story to food and drink which mildly suggested a certain form of coping. The car of his parents had been a Pontiac "pale green the colour of pistachio ice cream". He took into the attic biscuits and American soda. There was a short discussion with his grandmother, who was descended from a Boer leader responsible for genocide, about potted meat. Hints there of something darker perhaps. His parents' vehicle had been struck by a truck carrying two hundred marino sheep and the sheep and parents had "co-mingled in a disastrous fashion". In that phrase, Cartwright appeared cleverly to combine a child's understatement of the tragedy with the almost equally awkward accommodation of it by an adult who has the help of ironic distance. And, in the attic, where "if he could penetrate the dusty gloom, he could find his mother in the afterlife", the dials of the empire state radiola had "a cheese-like coloured glow." There, with the books of "The Wind in the Willows" and "The Water Babies", was Superman, showing him how to leap tall buildings in a single bound. While the radio lit up very slowly - "reluctant illumination which grew only slightly in intensity" - it was a turning point towards greater social interaction with others who were similarly captivated by the fantasy. Imagination, Cartwright believes, is our unique gift, the most distinctive fact of being human.



Photo: Bella Hardy - Songs Lost and Stolen

At the age of just 27, Arwen Arabella Hardy already has five critically acclaimed albums in her canon. Following the release of her solo debut, "Night Visiting", fRoots wrote "Bella Hardy is more than a new generation folk revivalist... Her potential is massive". Of the 2009 offering, "In The Shadow of Mountains", English Dance and Song magazine said "It's astounding... Surely no-one has any right to be writing songs with the sophistication of 'Sylvie Sovay', so early in their career...lyrical portraiture that brings to mind no less than Lennon and McCartney". There is indeed good reason to be excited by this Derbyshire chanteuse, who was born into a family of singers and who still lives in Edale in the Peak District "beyond Hope", following the study of literature at university. While she clearly has some way to go before reaching full creative maturity, she does have huge promise for both musically and lyrically she is more sure-footed than most of her contemporaries. One is inclined to consider as the yardsticks for quality Kate Rusby, the Unthanks and Jackie Oates but, perhaps oddly, I hear something of Judy Collins in her voice. There was certainly a bit of "Both Sides Now" in "Good Friday", a song that is featured on her latest record "Songs Lost & Stolen", and the one she sang on "The Verb". To live in London or nearer to home roots? That is her question but "if the city lights can't find you and you can't leave it all behind you" return must be the answer - in so doing, "content is in my blood today and not a thought is spared for sacrifice".

Bella Hardy - In the Shadow of Mountains - Sylvie Sovay - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=supLtXDMBWM

[Lateralthinking1]

Friday 29 April 2011

"For pataphysics all phenomena are totally gaseous." - Jean Baudrillard

"My father was in the civil service. I can remember standing in a bus shelter in the pouring rain, and that we were allowed candy floss at the end of the holiday if we had behaved." - Honor Blackman

"Eadem mutata resurgo" - Motto of The Collège de Pataphysique

The details of this week's programme:

(Not all the links and extracts are discussed in the programme. They are included to provide an introduction to, or reminder of, those featured.)

Ian McMillan introduces Radio 3's language cabaret with:

Verb regulars Peter Blegvad and Kevin Jackson who present a radiophonic drama extravaganza.

Daughter - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J-lpsQwDEA

Moose - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Moose-Animal...ion/1861893965

Best-selling children's author and man behind the Horrible Histories, Terry Deary.

Five Horrid Things - The Battle of Hastings - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N00eJAevSUc

Performance from You Are Wolf.

Trainsong - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5GgI_-a0XI

Poet Christian Bök explains how he has encoded his work into the DNA of a bacterium in a bid to make his work live forever.

The Aria of The Three-horned Enemy - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAy26...eature=related

The Verb - This Friday, 9.15pm-10pm, Radio 3

Also available for 7 days on BBC I-Player

[Globaltruth]

Review of "The Verb" - 22 April 2011 - Part 1

In this week's edition, Ian interviewed Anthony Browne who became the childrens' laureate when Michael Rosen stepped down. Browne, who began as an illustrator, has been writing for children since the mid-seventies and he has published 40 books, many of which have been translated into many languages. Specifically, his picture books have become famous for their slightly challenging themes and brilliantly realised, surreal illustrations. In "Willy the Wimp", there is a chimpanzee who wants to be a chippendale. "A Walk in the Park" features trees that have feet and a man who takes a tomato for a stroll. Browne has said that he is using his two-year stint as laureate to focus on the appreciation of picture books and his latest publication, "Playing the Shape Game", is a memoir tracing his life both in words and in pictures. In the programme, he described the process of developing the ideas for his books as like remembering a dream or planning a film. He agreed with Ian that the skill required for writing the pared down language needed for a picture book was often underestimated. However, those who produce books without words have a more difficult task for how, he asked, can someone impress an editor simply by just presenting pictures?



Photo: Anthony Browne - El Libro de los Cerdos

Browne has had his critics. Ellen Handler Spitz criticized "Willy the Wimp" for having a macho ideology and a racist presentation of stereotypes of African-American children who, she said, were designated as the villains in the book. She reached this conclusion despite the fact that no human children, African-American or otherwise, are featured in the book. Writing about his retelling of "Hansel and Gretel" in the Times Literary Supplement, Tanya Harrod observed, "What … do we make of this contemporary stepmother's squalid dressing table with lipsticks, talcum powder and cigarette ends lovingly depicted by Anthony Browne? Is her taste for fake furs and stiletto heels the cause of the family's poverty? Why have the Social Services let them slip through the net? I really cannot envision buying any child this book." Perhaps if she had tried to have envisage rather than envision, she would have seen the context for Browne's work. He has a strong eye for compassion and social justice. There is humour with that humanity. In their slightly strange combination of fantasy and reality, his books sit very comfortably in the long history of children's literature.

He is also quietly groundbreaking. During the discussion, he went on to explain his interest in the gaps and connections between words and pictures. In his view, the worst kinds of picture books are the ones in which the pictures are merely illustrations to the words or the words are just captions to the pictures. He believes that it is best to provide a creative space to be filled by the reader. A storybook is only ever half the story. The adult reads the words while the child reads the pictures. The rest of the story is in the connection of dialogue between adult and child. While this viewpoint is, without question, entirely plausible - it works in purely literary terms and it rings true from personal experience - I do think that there is a proviso here. Recent academic studies have indicated that it is the hearing sense that is developed first and more fully. While by age three or four, most children have learnt a basic understanding of sound, it is now argued that visual comprehension is still being assimilated by the average seven year old. This is not necessarily to detract from the assumptions upon which the books of Browne are based - language is not the same as sound - but it does suggest that his work, and how it is enjoyed, could usefully be taken to a higher level of research.

I particularly enjoyed this post Lat, and meant to comment earlier and to thank you for posting it.
Anthony Browne looms large in my grandchildren's reading - and a most pleasant experience it is too, having elements of subversion, layers of humour, clear and powerful graphics and always a point to make. sometimes though we get distracted by a detail and this will spawn a set of imaginings in its own right (so, how did the shoe get in the tree? Why is the crocodile in the window?). In some ways he reminds me of a visual Roald Dahl. I missed him on this show though...anyway thanks again for the post which I suspect was as good as the show.

[Lateralthinking1]

Global - Many thanks for your kind comments. - Lat.

[Lateralthinking1]

Regrettably there will not be reviews of the editions broadcast on Friday 29 April 2011 and Friday 6 May 2011.