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book awards
7/2/2008
Wales Book of the Year to Dannie Abse for The Presence
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"The unease I felt about writing it was dissipated when I realised the response to the book but I wish the book had never had to be written", was poet Dannie Abse's response after winning the Wales Book of the Year for The Presence, his memoir about the death of his wife of 54 years, the noted art historian Joan Mercer.
"This book was a salute to Joan."
"It wasn't meant to be a look-at-me book, it was about her. I'm really not sure whether she would have been proud of me."
Reviewer Carol Ann Duffy, however, is sure:
The Presence is a fragment of autobiography written from the most private part of a poet's heart, with a pen dipped in blood and tears.
That it transcends this to become both elegiac and celebratory, to inhabit both the suffered present and the beloved past, places it almost beyond the scope of routine criticism.
Perhaps then, it would be enough for Dannie Abse to say to him that his wife would have been proud of his book.
- from a review in the Telegraph by Carol Ann Duffy.
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The Presence
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book awards
6/28/2008
Margaret Atwood wins Prince of Asturias Award for Letters
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"The leading figure in Canadian literature and one of the most outstanding voices of contemporary fiction", Margaret Atwood has been awarded the 2008 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters
"for her outstanding literary work that has explored different genres with acuteness and irony, and because she cleverly assumes the classic tradition, defends women's dignity and denounces social unfairness." - quotations from Prince of Asturias Foundation.
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone. A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in miniskirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair. Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light.
There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh.
We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability? It was in the air; and it was still in the air, an afterthought, as we tried to sleep, in the army cots that had been set up in rows, with spaces between so we could not talk. We had flannelette sheets, like children's, and army-issue blankets, old ones that still said U.S. We folded our clothes neatly and laid them on the stools at the ends of the beds. The lights were turned down but not out. Aunt Sara and Aunt Elizabeth patrolled; they had electric cattle prods slung on thongs from their leather belts.
No guns though, even they could not be trusted with guns. Guns were for the guards, specially picked from the Angels. The guards weren't allowed inside the building except when called, and we weren't allowed out, except for our walks, twice daily, two by two around the football field, which was enclosed now by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The Angels stood outside it with their backs to us. They were objects of fear to us, but of something else as well. If only they would look. If only we could talk to them. Something could be exchanged, we thought, some deal made, some tradeoff, we still had our bodies. That was our fantasy.
We learned to whisper almost without sound. In the semidarkness we could stretch out our arms, when the Aunts weren't looking, and touch each other's hands across space. We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other's mouths. In this way we exchanged names, from bed to bed:
Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June.
- from The Handmaid's Tale
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The Handmaid's Tale: A Novel
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book notes
6/24/2008
"The owners of this country know the truth: It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." - George Carlin, 1937 – 2008
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It's the old American double standard, you know, say one thing, do something different. And, of course, the country is founded on the double standard. That's our history. We were founded on a very basic double standard. This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free. Am I right? A group of a slave owners who wanted to be free, so they killed a lot of white English people in order to continue owning their black African people, so they could wipe out the rest of the red Indian people and move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese people. You know what the motto of this country ought to be? You give up a color, we'll wipe it out. You got it.
So, anyway, about eighty years after the Constitution is ratified, eighty years later, the slaves are freed. Not so you'd really notice it, of course. Just sort of on paper. And that was, of course, during the Civil War. Now, there's another phrase I dearly love. That is a true oxymoron if I've ever heard one: civil war. Do you think any country could really have a civil war? "Say, pardon me" [gun shots] - "I'm awfully sorry. I'm awfully sorry." Now, of course, the Civil War has been over for about 120 years, but not so you'd really notice it, because we still have these people called Civil War buffs, people who thought it was a really keen war, and they study the battles carefully, and they try to improve on the strategies and the tactics to increase the body count, in case we have to go through it again sometime. In fact, some of these people actually get dressed up in uniform once a year and go out and refight these battles. You know what I say? Use live ammunition, [bleep], would you please? You might just raise the intelligence level of the American gene pool.
But what do you expect? Hey, come on, this is a warlike country. We come from that northern European, basically the northern European genes, the blue eyes. Those blue eyes. Boy everybody in the world learned real quick, didn't they? When those blue eyes sail out of the north, you better nail everything down [bleep]. Nail it down, strap it down, or they'll grab it. If they can't take it home, they'll burn it. If they can't burn it, they'll [bleep]. That's what happened to us. And it's a warlike country. C'mon, I mean, forget foreign policy. Even the domestic rhetoric is warlike. Everything about our domestic policy invokes the thought of war. We don't like something in this country, we declare war on it. The war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on crime, the war on AIDS, the war on cancer. We've got the only national anthem that mentions [bleep] rockets and bombs in the [bleep] thing. You know what I mean?
"I think every comedian who came after Carlin looked up to him as a guy who showed that a stand-up comedian wasn't just telling jokes, he was making commentary. He was a thinker, not just a joke teller. And also, Carlin, because of his long career, I mean, he showed that being a stand-up comedian was an important thing, as something you can do for your entire life. He didn’t get any help from movies. He never had a movie career. He never had a sitcom career like a lot of other stand-up comics. But he could be a top draw on the stand-up comedy circuit for more than forty years, and that was a real inspiration, and I think it's helped make stand-up comedy a vital art form today."
-excerpts from an interview on DemocracyNow! with Richard Zoglin, author of Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America.
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Three Times Carlin: An Orgy of George
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book awards
6/19/2008
Royal Society Prize for Science Books goes to Mark Lynas, for Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
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What is in store for our planet and our lives as global temperatures rise degree by Celsius degree, up to six degrees of global warming by the year 2100? Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet answers that question and it's author, Mark Lynas, has been awarded the 2008 Royal Society Prize for Science Books.
"Lynas's book, writes Lindesay Irvine for the Guardian, "walks readers through the hellish scenario implied by a warming planet, degree by degree. A single degree hotter, he shows, will bring severe droughts; two will see the US population fleeing a desiccated land, and so on. Beyond six degrees, which he explains may see huge fireballs crashing into cities, the story finishes, along with most of humanity. Drawing on a vast amount of research, Lynas's book tempers its pessimism by insisting that time remains for the world to avert the coming crisis."
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Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
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book notes
6/17/2008
Media Guru Tony Schwartz, 1923 - 2008
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The best thing about radio is that people were born without earlids. You can't close your ears to it.
Called the man "who moved sound recording into the realm of the arts," by photographer Edward Steichen, "the King of Sound" by the New York Times and the "the guru of the electronic age" by Marshall McLuhan, Tony Schwartz began "documenting life in sound and pictures" in 1945 "when he bought his first Webcor wire recorder and began to record the people and sounds around him. From that hobby resulted nineteen phonograph albums for Folkways and Columbia Records, a diverse collections of voices, street sounds and music, part of the ennormous body of Tony Schwartz's work now housed in the Library of Congress
Tony Schwartz authored two influential books on communications and the media. The Responsive Chord (1973) was the only book, according to McLuhan, to begin to approach the "problem of human scale in relation to electronic media". Media: The Second God (1982) described how media has changed our society and how to use it to change our society. On that subject Tony Schwartz was the supreme master having created more than 20,000 radio and television spots for products, political candidates (over 200) and non-profit public interest groups, and not to mention, the Guerrilla Media Program, a citizen's guide to using the electronic mdia for social change.
Tony Schwartz is best known, however, as the creator of the infamous "Daisy" commercial. The sad truth is that the lesson of that commercial has been so well learned by today's campaign gurus:
Forget about trying to impart information about your candidate. Voters already have an opinion and have no experience of solutions anyway. Instead, create sensory impressions to evoke an emotional response. (Center for Media Literacy)
But read this about Tony Schwartz from an interview with
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, American Professor of Communication and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania:
Tony's messages involve listeners and viewers in an intricate and subtle dance, that ultimately leaves you in a partnership. And so, in the typical Schwartz message you're left feeling very involved. And you're also left with powerful residual impact. The reason people read Goldwater into the "Daisy" commercial was because everything in that ad is speaking to their fears about nuclear weapons, and everything in the campaign was magnifying Goldwater's stands about nuclear weapons. And so you naturally invest that into an open message that invites those fears. That makes that the most powerful ad of that campaign. It also makes it the cleanest ad of the campaign. Because to the extent that Goldwater is in the ad he was invested there by the audience. And the audience isn't going to indict itself for dirty campaigning. Tony's ad is absolutely clean...
If one takes Tony Schwartz's philosophy of communication seriously then he will never be able to use communication to persuade you to hold something you don't already believe. Essentially he believes that we have an aggregation of experiences and attitudes that advertising can bring to the fore, can make more salient -- or that advertising can push back, can force into the background. And that advertising is not the process of putting things there, but drawing things out. If that phi
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6/16/2008
Vincent Bugliosi on The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder
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Are there no consequences for committing a crime of colossal proportions?
As a Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney, Vincent Bugliosi successfully prosecuted 105 of 106 felony jury trials including twenty-one murder convictions without a single loss. As an outspoken critic of the media and lawyers and judges in major trials, Bugliosi wrote a bestselling book, Outrage, on the acquittal of O.J. Simpson, and The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President, on the 2000 Bush vs. Gore decision.
Helter Skelter was Bugliosi's first book. Written in 1974 about 1969 Manson Family murders and Bugliosi's own prosecution of Charles Manson and his followers, it became the biggest selling true-crime book in publishing history and won the 1975 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime book. Now Vincent Bugliosi is releasing his nineth and latest book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.
Perhaps the most amazing thing to me about the belief of many that George Bush lied to the American public in starting his war with Iraq is that the liberal columnists who have accused him of doing this merely make this point, and then go on to the next paragraph in their columns. Only very infrequently does a columnist add that because of it Bush should be impeached. If the charges are true, of course Bush should have been impeached, convicted, and removed from office. That's almost too self-evident to state.
But he deserves much more than impeachment. I mean, in America, we apparently impeach presidents for having consensual sex outside of marriage and trying to cover it up. If we impeach presidents for that, then if the president takes the country to war on a lie where thousands of American soldiers die horrible, violent deaths and over 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children, even babies are killed, the punishment obviously has to be much, much more severe. That's just common sense....
Let's look at the way some of the leading liberal lights (and, of course, the rest of the entire nation with the exception of those few recommending impeachment) have treated the issue of punishment for Bush's cardinal sins. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote about "the false selling of the Iraq War. We were railroaded into an unnecessary war." Fine, I agree. Now what? Krugman just goes on to the next paragraph. But if Bush falsely railroaded the nation into a war where over 100,000 people died, including 4,000 American soldiers, how can you go on to the next paragraph as if you had been writing that Bush spent the weekend at Camp David with his wife? For doing what Krugman believes Bush did, doesn't Bush have to be punished commensurately in some way? Are there no consequences for committing a crime of colossal proportions? - excerpted from The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder
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The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder
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book awards
6/13/2008
Rawi Hage wins wins the €100,000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for debut novel De Niro's Game
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"A magnificent achievement for a writer writing in a third language," was the opinion of the judges. "Its originality, its power, its lyricism, as well as its humane appeal all mark De Niro's Game as the work of a major literary talent and make Rawi Hage a truly deserving winner." "I am a fortunate man", said Lebanese author Rawi Hage on hearing that he had won. "After a long journey of war, displacement and separation, I feel that I am one of the few wanderers who is privileged enough to have been rewarded, and for that I am very grateful." De Niro's Game is the story of Bassam and George growing up in war-ravaged Beirut during the civil war in the 1980's. Reaching adulthood, they must choose: stay in the city and embrace a life of crime or go into exile abroad, alienated from the only life they have known.
Ten thousand bombs had landed, and I was waiting for George.Ten thousand bombs had landed on Beirut, that crowded city, and I was lying on a blue sofa covered with white sheets to protect it from dust and dirty feet.
It is time to leave, I was thinking to myself. My mother's radio was on. It had been on since the start of the war, a radio with Rayovac batteries that lasted ten thousand years. My mother's radio was wrapped in a cheap, green plastic cover, with holes in it, smudged with the residue of her cooking fingers and dust that penetrated its knobs, cinched against its edges. Nothing ever stopped those melancholic Fairuz songs that came out of it.
I was not escaping the war; I was running away from Fairuz, the notorious singer.
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