Monday, October 31, 2016

2012 / Books of the year

Photo by Ralph Gibson



2012

Books of the year


From Zadie Smith's new novel to Robert Macfarlane's journeys on foot and memoirs by Edna O'Brien and Salman Rushdie… 
Which books have most impressed our writers this year? 


The Observer
25 November 2012


John Banville
Novelist





The Old Ways

Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot(Hamish Hamilton £20) is a wonderful book – literally, a book full of wonders – in which he takes to the world's pathways, from chalk downs and an estuarial mirror-world in England, to Palestine, Spain, the Himalayas. He has a poet's eye, and a prose style that will make many a novelist burn with envy. In a barbarous time, Macfarlane reminds us of what it is to be civilised.
La Folie Baudelaire (Allen Lane £35) by Roberto Calasso is an extraordinarily ingenious and learned study of Baudelaire and Baudelaire's Paris, "capital of the 19th century", and of the invention of modernism in literature and, especially, in painting. Only a mind as various as Calasso's would think to compare Manet's Olympia with a photograph by Weegee. One had thought they didn't write books like this any more, but Calasso does.

Ali Smith
Novelist





The Panopticon

The great Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector once wrote that she wanted her writing to be like a punch in the stomach to her readers, "for life is a punch in the stomach". This year the life in Jenni Fagan's debut novel, The Panopticon (Heinemann £12.99), knocked the breath out of me, Peter Hobbs's In the Orchard, the Swallows (Faber £10.99) picked me up and dusted me down, and a reread of Brigid Brophy's 1967 novel The King of a Rainy Country (Coelacanth £10) boosted me better than any Omega 3.

Wendy Cope
Poet





Hope: A Tragedy

My discovery of the year was the American novelist Shalom Auslander, who is brave, outrageous and very funny. I recommend his 2009 memoir Foreskin's Lament, as well as his 2012 novel, Hope: A Tragedy (both Picador £7.99).
Three of my favourite crime writers brought out excellent new books this year: A Room Full of Bones (Quercus £7.99) by Elly Griffiths, Kind of Cruel (Hodder £7.99) by Sophie Hannah and Broken Harbour (Hodder £12.99) by Tana French. And I enjoyed Glyn Maxwell's On Poetry (Oberon Masters £12.99) – occasionally mad but very interesting.

Sunday, October 30, 2016

John Banville's Top Ten List



John Banville's Top Ten List

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William John Banville (born 1945), who also writes as Benjamin Black for a series of mysteries, is an acclaimed Irish novelist, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter.  He has said he aims to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has.” His novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award in 1989. His fourteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 2005. In 2011, Banville was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, while 2013 brought both the Irish PEN Award and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. His other novels include The Revolutions Trilogy - Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981) and The Newton Letter (1982) - The Untouchable (1997), The Infinities (2009) and Ancient Light (2012). For more information, visit his official website.
1. Ill Seen, Ill Said by Samuel Beckett (1981). In terse, haunting prose, Beckett’s novella meditates on the absurdities of life and death, our grim longing for happiness, and “that old tandem” of reality and its unnamable “contrary.” The narrative itself, boiled down to poetic reflections, focuses on an old woman enduring her last days in a remote cabin. In the end, though all is blackness and void, Beckett wishes on us “grace to breathe that void,” even momentarily.


2. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864). Aloof, unhappy, and tortured by his own “hyperconsciousness,” Dostoevsky’s narrator prefers to remain underground, away from normal life, because at least there he can be free. When he forces himself to dine with three schoolfellows, their carefree laughter and drinking sends him “into a fury.” Afterward, he is seemingly moved by the plight of a young prostitute. But neither pity nor love is re­ deeming in this story whose narrator asks: “Which is better —cheap happiness or exalted suffering?” Dostoevsky’s preference is clear.

3. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922). Filled with convoluted plotting, scrambled syntax, puns, neologisms, and arcane mythological allusions, Ulysses recounts the misadventures of schlubby Dublin advertising salesman Leopold Bloom on a single day, June 16, 1904. As Everyman Bloom and a host of other characters act out, on a banal and quotidian scale, the major episodes of Homer’s ­Odyssey —including encounters with modern-day sirens and a Cyclops —Joyce’s bawdy mock-epic suggests the improbability, perhaps even the pointlessness, of heroism in the modern age.

4. Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann (1947). Mann retells the Faust legend as the story of wunderkind composer Adrian Leverkühn, who trades his human feeling for a brilliant career and demonic inspiration. Leverkühn’s biography, narrated by a faithful childhood friend from the vantage point of 1943 Germany, serves as a symbolic commentary on a nation’s cultural hubris and downfall. Mann probes the complex tensions between aesthetics and morality, culture and politics, in his trademark dense, precise, endlessly qualified prose. Given his theme —the culpability of genius in the sins of his society —the narrator’s almost infuriatingly overscrupulous command of language assumes a redemptive gravitas.

5. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851). This sweeping saga of obsession, vanity, and vengeance at sea can be read as a harrowing parable, a gripping adventure story, or a semiscientific chronicle of the whaling industry. No matter, the book rewards patient readers with some of fiction’s most memorable characters, from mad Captain Ahab to the titular white whale that crippled him, from the honorable pagan Queequeg to our insightful narrator/surrogate (“Call me”) Ishmael, to that hell-bent vessel itself, the Pequod.

6. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955). “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” So begins the Russian master’s infamous novel about Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who falls madly, obsessively in love with a twelve-year-old “nymphet,” Dolores Haze. So he marries the girl’s mother. When she dies he becomes Lolita’s father. As Humbert describes their car trip —a twisted mockery of the American road novel —Nabokov depicts love, power, and obsession in audacious, shockingly funny language.

7. Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald (2001). During decades of travels through Europe, a nameless architectural historian accidentally keeps meeting Austerlitz, a neurasthenic architect who is incrementally confronting his buried connection to the Holocaust. Incantatory and almost vertiginous in its repetitiveness, this one-paragraph novel depicts the struggle of a personal narrative to melt the frozen memory of collective trauma.


8. Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon (1950). As this darkest of noirs opens, nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier, already a pimp, thug, and petty thief, has just become a murderer. What follows are searing portraits of the cruel and alienated young man who sees violence as a form of self-definition and the corrupt grim world that made him.



9. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726, 1735). Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s doctor, embarks on four wondrous voyages from England to remote nations. Gulliver towers over six-inch Lilliputians and cowers under the giants in Brobdingnag. He witnesses a flying island and a country where horses are civilized and people are brutes. Fanciful and humorous, Swift’s fictional travelogue is a colorfully veiled but bitter indictment of eighteenth-century politics and culture.


10. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1847–48). The subtitle is “A Novel Without a Hero,” and never was a hero more unnecessary. In Becky Sharp, we find one of the most delicious heroines of all time. Sexy, resourceful, and duplicitous, Becky schemes her way through society, always with an eye toward catching a richer man. Cynical Thackeray, whose cutting portraits of society are hilarious, resists the usual punishments doled out to bad Victorian women and allows that the vain may find as much happiness in their success as the good do in their virtue.




Saturday, October 29, 2016

Phil Collins / This much I know / 'I realise in hindsight how annoying I was'

Phil Collins

THIS MUCH I KNOW

Phil Collins: 'I realise in hindsight how annoying I was'



The musician, 65, on boozing, soul music and being on Live Aid twice


Johnny Davis
Saturday 29 October 2016 14.00 BST


I auditioned for Dennis Hopper’s role in Speed. In the early 1990s I really wanted to do more movies, so Jill [Tavelman, Collins’s second wife] and I bought Cole Porter’s old house on Sunset Boulevard.
I used to have a lot of meetings at The Ivy with directors, film producers and writers. But all they wanted to know was, “What’s it like to be out in front of 50,000 people?” It was a levelling experience. I wasn’t a heart-throb so I tended to attract axe murderers, those kind of parts.
I almost drank myself to death. The hospital doctors asked if my papers were in order. My pancreas and my other organs were fucked up and my doctor told me retrospectively that he didn’t know if I’d pull through.
My kids left me in Switzerland to go to Miami [after Collins divorced third wife Orianne Cevey in 2008] and I was left with a big hole. I had nowhere to go and I didn’t have my kids. So I was getting up in the morning and having a couple of drinks. I felt I owed myself a rest and a chance to do whatever I wanted. And then of course it escalates. Vodka was my drink of choice.
I realise in hindsight just how bloody annoying I was. You know, I did Live Aid not once but twice – “Oh, and now he thinks he can act.” It was like, “Just look at this guy,” and, “This guy just won’t go away.” But from my point of view I was doing it because I was being asked to do things I loved by people I admired.
The best piece of advice I’ve been given? “Never let go of a lady’s leg.” Or “Cheer up,” probably. Actually, nobody seems to give me advice any more, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I don’t listen.
I nearly played a Russian serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, “the butcher of Rostov”, a cannibal who killed 50-odd kids. He was in a cage at his trial. HBO were going to make a film and at that point I was trying so hard to go against type. My wife said, “You can’t do this, it’s terrible!”
I sing along to Flight of the Conchords with my kids. It’s very clever. Those songs aren’t easy to write.
It feels very hip to be liked by Kanye West and Ice-T. I’m glad they were brave enough to come out and say something. You know, the music I listened to growing up, apart from the Beatles, was soul music. I think that influenced the way I write. “Easy Lover” and “Sussudio” have Earth, Wind & Fire horns, so perhaps black listeners pick up on that. Also, in America there was less attention to bias and critics and reviews.
You stick around long enough and people reassess you. I haven’t finished quite yet. There’s still life in the old body.

THE GUARDIAN



THIS MUCH I KNOW




Marina Abramović in her own words / ‘Why don’t we have a ménage à trois?’



Marina Abramović
Photo by Platon


Marina Abramović in her own words: ‘Why don’t we have a ménage à trois?’


It was 1984, and the artist’s relationship was falling apart. She describes her attempts to save it, in an exclusive extract from her memoir


 ‘I face so much jealousy’ – read the interview with Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović
Saturday 22 October 2016 09.00 BST


ur plan was for me to start the walk at the Great Wall of China’s eastern end, the Gulf of Bohai on the Yellow Sea, and for Ulay to start at its western end, the Jiayu Pass in the Gobi desert. After walking 2,500km each, we would meet in the middle.

About our original plan, to marry when we met there, we now spoke less and less. It was 1984, and my relationship with Ulay was falling apart. Since the death of his mother two years earlier – specifically since I had refused, on the night of the funeral, to conceive a child – we had been furious at each other, but saying little about it.

Marina Abramović says having children would have been ‘a disaster for my work’


Marina Abramovic: ‘One only has limited energy in the body, and I would have had to divide it’
 Photograph: Mike McGregor/Commissioned for The Guardian

Marina Abramović says having children would have been ‘a disaster for my work’

‘I had three abortions,’ the performance artist told the Tagesspiegel newspaper. ‘One only has limited energy in the body, and I would have had to divide it’

Nicole Puglise
Tuesday 26 July 2016 21.16 BST

The performance artist Marina Abramović said she has had three abortions during her life because having children would have been “a disaster for her work”.
In an interview with the German newspaper Tagesspiegel translated by ArtNet, she said that children hold women back in the art world.
“I had three abortions because I was certain that it would be a disaster for my work. One only has limited energy in the body, and I would have had to divide it,” Abramović said in the interview published on Monday.
“In my opinion that’s the reason why women aren’t as successful as men in the art world. There’s plenty of talented women. Why do men take over the important positions? It’s simple. Love, family, children – a woman doesn’t want to sacrifice all of that.”
The 69-year-old is famous for her more than 40 years of performance art. One of her earliest works in 1974 invited the audience to use an assortment of objects on her, from a feather boa to flowers to a loaded pistol. She told the Guardian that she was “ready to die” during the performance.
“The difference between theater and performance is that in the theater the blood is ketchup, and in performance, it’s real,” she told Tagesspiegel of her work.
In 2010, Abramović sat passively across from strangers and celebrities at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), staring into their eyes in a piece titled The Artist Is Present. It was turned into a documentary and also controversially adapted into a music video by the rapper Jay-Z.
Ahead of her 512 Hours performance at the Serpentine in London in 2014, Abramović told the Guardian that she was “old-fashioned” in real life compared with her artwork.
“Of course, I dream to have this perfect man, who does not want to change me. And I’m so not marriage material, it’s terrible. But my dream is to have those Sunday mornings, where you’re eating breakfast and reading newspapers with somebody,” she said.
But in her interview with Tagesspiegel, she said she was “totally free” by having no husband or family. Her artwork creates a demanding travel schedule and she said she didn’t think she could live differently.
“I am the artwork. I can’t send a painting, so I send myself … In the last year I didn’t spend more than 20 days in New York. At airports I had to think ‘where is my suitcase arriving from?’” she said.
In the interview, Abramović also looked ahead to her 70th birthday party at the Guggenheim – “We’ll see if I can dance down a pole from all the way up in the museum. I’m still practicing,” she said – though she’s already planned her own funeral.





Friday, October 28, 2016

Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks: from golden boys to wasted talents


Tom  Cruise and Tom Hanks


Cruise and Hanks: from golden boys to wasted talents



The two Toms are the last 80s superstars still able to open a movie on their name alone. But movies such as Inferno and Jack Reacher confirm their descent into dependability

Nicholas Barber
Thursday 27 October 2016 17.08 BST

S
tatistically speaking, there must be some people who are desperate to see Inferno, the third Ron Howard film to star Tom Hanks as a “symbology” professor who saves the world by misinterpreting paintings. By the same token, some people must be counting the days until they can watch Tom Cruise breaking strangers’ limbs again in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back – an eyebrow-raising subtitle for any sequel. But are these airport-paperback adaptations, both released in October, really the most productive use of their stars’ time? Given that Hanks is now 60 and Cruise is 54 – and that they wouldn’t need any more money if they lived to 1,000 – shouldn’t they be doing something more worthwhile than prolonging a couple of second-rate action franchises?


Of course they should. The fact is, though, that it’s the Toms’ refusal to change a winning formula that makes them such a unique phenomenon. As Michael Douglas drifts towards retirement and Bruce Willis slides into direct-to-DVD purgatory, Cruise and Hanks stand as the only Hollywood megastars who still have their names above the titles of films, year upon year, long after they found fame in the 1980s. They are the last of their kind: the Tom Tom Club.



At the start of 2016, Forbes ranked Cruise as the world’s fourth highest-paid actor, and both Toms apparently offer their employers value for money. In January, a movie-business data analysis site, The Numbers, totted up how much “someone adds in value to the film industry each year”, placing Cruise as the sixth most-bankable person in Hollywood, and Hanks as No 7. The Toms’ onscreen charisma is the most obvious explanation for this Midas touch, of course, but it would be nothing without their uncanny ability to know exactly what audiences want from them, and to deliver it, time and time again. They aren’t just actors, but auteurs. It is the Toms, rather than the directors or writers, who define their films.


Even though Tom H is six years older than Tom C, there are plenty of parallels between them. Both spent their childhoods flitting from school to school. Both had youthful phases of devout Christianity: Cruise planned to be a Catholic priest, and Hanks has said that he was a “Bible-toting evangelical”. Both had their first starring roles in romantic comedies opposite unconventional blonde beauties in the early 1980s: Cruise fell for a prostitute in Risky Business in 1983, Hanks for a mermaid in Splash in 1984. In the 1990s, their wage packets rocketed. Hanks is reported to have made $70m from Forrest Gump in 1994, Cruise made the same amount from Mission: Impossible in 1996. More significantly, both were nominated for Oscars throughout the 1990s, although while Hanks won two, Cruise has yet to pick up any. And both received their most recent Oscar nominations back in the early 00s.

Marina Abramović talks friends, enemies and fear / ‘I face so much jealousy’

Marina Abramović
‘I face so much jealousy’: Marina Abramović talks friends, enemies and fear
The artist has always pushed herself to the limit, letting strangers cut her and turning her breakup into a performance. But only now does she understand why

 ‘Why don’t we have a ménage à trois?’ – an extract from her new memoir
Simon Hattenstone
Saturday 22 October 2016 09.00 BST


“Y
ou are 10 minutes early,” Marina Abramović says. The performance artist leads me to her bedroom in the Greenwich Village apartment where she lives alone – minimalist, lime green sheets, huge TV on the wall – and hands me a book. “You have not seen final copy of my book yet? Now with pictures. Here, look. I am back in 10 minutes.”

Marina Abramović reveals plans for her funeral, 'the artist’s last piece'



Marina Abramović reveals plans for her funeral, 'the artist’s last piece'

Performance artist, 67, wants three bodies – one real, two fake – buried in the cities she has lived in the longest, and singer Antony Hegarty to perform

Nancy Groves
Wednesday 1 July 2015 03.41 BST


Marina Abramović has already planned her own funeral, which will incorporate her final performance work, live music, a colourful dress code and plenty of black comedy.
In a keynote speech in Sydney during her 12-day residency for Kaldor Public Art Projects, Abramović – in good health at 67 – read out her manifesto, concluding that “an artist should die consciously without fear” and that “the funeral is the artist’s last piece before leaving”.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Performance artist Marina Abramović / 'I was ready to die'

Marina Abramović

Performance artist Marina Abramović: 'I was ready to die'


In Belgrade, audiences cut her; in New York, they came in their thousands and wept. What will happen when Marina Abramović lands in London for her most radical show yet? Emma Brockes talks to the art superstar about lipstick, masochism – and why she's too much for any man 

 Have you got what it takes to follow the Abramović method? – video 

 Marina Abramović at the Serpentine


Emma Brockes
Monday 12 May 2014 15.43 BST



In 1974, Marina Abramović did a terrifying experiment. At a gallery in her native Belgrade, Serbia, she laid out 72 items on a trestle table and invited the public to use them on her in any way they saw fit. Some of the items were benign; a feather boa, some olive oil, roses. Others were not. "I had a pistol with bullets in it, my dear. I was ready to die." At the end of six hours, she walked away, dripping with blood and tears, but alive. "How lucky I am," she says in her still heavy accent, and laughs.

Marina Abramović / 'The planet is dying. We have to be warriors'

Marina Abramović



Marina Abramović: 'The planet is dying. We have to be warriors'



In an exclusive interview in Tasmania, the performance artist explains why she stays out of the studio, resists nostalgia … and how she ate three raw onions

Nancy Groves
Thursday 18 June 2015 04.18 BST


Let’s start with a quick quiz: what do Marina Abramović (Serbian performance artist) and Tony Abbott (Australian prime minister) have in common?
Answer: they’ve both been filmed eating a raw onion. A whole one. In fact, Abramović ate three. “The first time, the light on video wasn’t so good. The second, sound was lousy. Third, I couldn’t speak or talk, my throat was burning.”
The Onion is one of 13 self-portraits at the beating heart of Private Archaeology, a new exhibition of Abramović’s work at Mona, the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania. Filmed between 1975 and 2002, these extreme video close-ups show the artist furiously brushing her hair, gnawing her cuticles, meditating, being strangled by a boa constrictor, and lying: under a pile of crystals, in shallow water, or upside down.
“Good art is never made in studio,” Abramović says. “Good art I make in life.”

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

How I became a convert to the cult of Marina Abramović


Marina Abramović
How I became a convert to the cult of Marina Abramović


'The grandmother of performance art' had people openly weeping at New York's MoMA. Zoe Williams spent a whole day in her presence at her long-anticipated London show. Did she break down?

Zoe Williams
Saturday 14 June 2014 08.00 BST



R
obert is a 46-year-old psychiatrist and Elisa is 28, and from Italy, and they both arrived outside the Serpentine gallery at around quarter to six on Wednesday morning. They were waiting for the opening of the Marina Abramović exhibition – Elisa had seen her three times already: on London's Southbank, in Milan and in Madrid. "I think she expresses something that was already inside of us but that we couldn't express." At last year's retrospective at MoMA, The Artist is PresentAbramović sat in a chair; people came and sat opposite her. Many were openly weeping during it. Lars, 36, a fine artist who is joint first in the queue, having arrived at 4.30am, explained: "In that show, she was just a mirror, as if you were facing yourself. That's why so many people got so sad and started crying. Because they couldn't actually face themselves."