Losing [my] medallions: After the silence

Losing [my] medallions: After the silence: OK. So, I concentrate on the pattern of words, the characters emerge and events actual and potential begin to take shape. Are you still with me?

Joanna Trollope on BBCRadio3

Great to hear Joanna Trollope this morning on Essential Classics, BBCRadio3  

Is this available as a podcast? Could it be?

Joanna Trollope talked briefly about how she chooses the subjects of her novels by tapping into current preoccupations and how she enjoys doing the research for the books, talking to people with first hand experience of the issues involved. In particular, she spoke about The Other Family published in 2010 and her most recent book, The Soldier's Wife.

Very interesting.

Joanna Trollope:

• on Wikipedia.
•  Official website
  

 The Other Family 
Hardcover, 336 pages, published by Doubleday; 1st edition (18 Feb 2010)
ISBN-10: 0385616147 ISBN-13: 978-0385616140
Details on Amazon

The Soldier's Wife
Paperback, 432 pages, published by Black Swan (14 Feb 2013)
ISBN-10: 0552776424 ISBN-13: 978-0552776424
Details on Amazon 

Ends

Salman Rushdie: The Enchantress of Florence. A review.

Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence finds him on familiar, East-meets-West ground, as a Florentine refugee turns up at the Mughal court, says Tim Adams in a Guardian review.

368 pages hardcover; Jonathan Cape; First Edition First Printing edition (3 April 2008)
ISBN-10: 0224061631 ISBN-13: 978-0224061636 (details from Amazon)

'This book is a load of old cobblers' I was thinking most of the time I was reading it. It teeters on the brink of being thrown over in favour of something else and indeed I almost gave it up on more than one occasion in favour of something more intelligent and sensible, but then it beguiled me into reading another page and another page.

It is a conjuring trick; a hall of mirrors.

So I kept on reading one more page until in the end I discovered I had been reading a masterpiece; a cultural, historical and human tour de force. It seems, superficially, to be nothing much more than artful, colourful fluff, a tiresome confection, but, by the end, the 'fluff' has consolidated into, or perhaps better, out of the fluff has appeared a magical evocation of an age and its people. I put the book down having read the last page stunned by its audacity and its artistry. It is a work of art, of genius, superficially frivolous, totally profound. 'Old cobblers', it transpires, joined end to end, maketh magic.

The story is the story, overall, of the renaissance mind.

It is the time of Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, but set elsewhere. Niccolo Machiavelli in Medici Florence, The Ottoman empire in Turkey, the great Mughal emperor Akbar in India, the discovery of the New World - these are the fixed points in a shimmering mirage of a tale. Wonderful.

It is a complete waste of time until, at the end, you realise what Rushdie has done.

For more reviews see Goodreads.

Ends

Tweet for the day

From Twitter:
YA Lit ‏@4YALit

Just as we must dance as if no one is watching, we must write as if no one is reading. — Robin LeFevers

... as if ... Dancing.

A Larkin epiphany

I have discovered Philip Larkin, the poet. I mean, discovered. I had always thought of PL as a bit of a miserable old git but this is something else.

Larkin,cycling, came across a church out in the countryside somewhere, stopped to look and was moved by the experience, perhaps unexpectedly. The poem begins:

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.

and ends:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

- the last stanza from Church Going by Philip Larkin

Full text 

The credit for this late epiphany must go to Richard Holloway and Andrew Motion and the BBC Radio 4 programme Honest Doubt: the history of an epic struggle, episode 19/20, On presence and absence; broadcast at 13.45h on Thursday 21st June 2012.

From the BBC web page:

In a series of personal essays, Richard Holloway considers the tensions between faith and doubt over the last 3000 years.

In today's programme, Richard Holloway focuses on an enduring paradox ... that God can be experienced both as present and absent at the same time. He explores the idea with the help of three post-war poets - Philip Larkin, John Betjeman and RS Thomas.

He talks to Larkin's friend and literary executor, Sir Andrew Motion, about Larkin's complex attitude to religion and reads from Larkin's seminal poem 'Aubade'. Larkin himself introduces his poem, 'Churchgoing' [sic], which expresses the nostalgia of what we lose when we lose our faith.

John Betjeman's religious struggle is discussed with Betjeman's biographer AN Wilson. And for the Welsh priest poet RS Thomas, the theme of God's absence and presence is compared to finding a [hare's form empty but recently vacated] on the hillside - 'we find the place still warm with his presence, but he is absent'.

Producer: Olivia Landsberg
A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4.

Brilliant radio. Brilliant poet.

 Ends

Merchants of Culture

This is a great book. John B Thompson successfully captures the middle ground between the academic thesis and the chat down the pub. It's serious stuff delivered accessibly.

Merchants of Culture: the publishing business in the twenty-first century. Polity, 2010.
Book details.

The book explains, for the publishing industry, particularly trade publishing, how we got here and why. It is a fascinating read and it explained things to me that I had never properly understood before.

1. The Growth of the Retail Chains. 
2. The Rise of Literary Agents. 
3. The Emergence of Publishing Corporations.

They are the first three chapter headings.
This book deals with the publishing business in the UK and USA, ie London and New York, the centres of the English language publishing industry. There are commonalities and differences and John Thompson addresses them both.
He continues the story with an analysis of the Polarization of the Field between the big corporation and the small press, with little in between, and then discusses the part played by Big Books and Extreme Publishing in the corporation business dynamic. For corporations, at the end of the day, it is all about the bottom line and delivering "growth" year on year. Imprints within big corporations pin their hopes on Big Books, in other words, on books they hope will sell in large quantities, and on Extreme Publishing, that is, bringing a new title to market very fast and reprinting very fast.
Chapter 7 is entitled Shrinking Windows and it recounts how opportunities for marketing books have diminished; less retailers, less time, more expense.
It was only when I came to Chapter 8 that I felt the pace begin to drag; that's page 291ff. That's some achievement! For three hundred pages the author had kept my interest without question. At this point there was some reiteration, inevitably, of what had gone before but, once through the back eddy, the stream picked up speed again fairly quickly. Chapter 8 is called The Wild West and it is about book retailing in the UK, particularly the end of the Net Book Agreement on prices and the rise of the supermarket as a power player in the business. Supermarkets demand, and get, very high discounts from the publishers, squeezing the publishers harder than they were already. The situation in the USA is different; there is a sort of gentleman's agreement enshrined in law which seems to stabilise the market to some extent. It is still tight but it is not quite as wild as it is in the UK but, then, the size of the market is so much bigger in the USA compared to the UK, so the pressures are bound to be different.
The last two chapters deal with The Digital Revolution and Trouble in the Trade and there is a Conclusion: Facing an Uncertain Future.
I've learnt a lot and I understand better how the market operates and what people involved in the book business might be thinking and why. I thoroughly recommend this book.

Poem: December. Newcastle Emlyn.

December

It was sunny for a while

In Newcastle Emlyn

Then the rain returned

Sleet, hail, rain - a regular ice storm

And the day was suddenly

Dark. And white.

The river is full, the Teifi,

Winding its way first this way then that way

About the town,

Fuller than before,

Another drop and it will

Be all over the place,

All over the shop,

Café, hotel, farmyard, field

Literally. Figuratively.

Actually. A riverful of water.

[13.12.2011; revised 14.12.2011]