Monday, 9 January 2012
Priors Gardens
first feedback I have had since the book was published on Saturday morning is - we like the NewYork shoot-out sequence. Well well.
Sunday, 8 January 2012
Priors Gardens - the story of the book
Flashing Blade has posted about the story of the book I wrote, published yesterday. He is right to do so, because it was his idea in the first place. It came from a missed flight (not our fault) which left us at a loose end one afternoon in west London. On the rather long Tube journey out to South Ruislip, where I spent most of the first seven years of my life, I told him about the two girls my age who were my neighbours there, and what I knew or thought had become of them. Two at least of the three of us became quite famous in our way. So he said, this is a great story. So I wrote it. It is fiction. Knowing those families and especially those other two girls inspired me to write it, but the characters are fictional. Read it.
my books of 2011
I am quite a fan of David Mitchell, and I read, in late June, Black Swan Green, the story of a 13-year-old boy in a village in middle England, in 1982. The boy has a stammer he manages, mostly, to conceal from his peers (as I did mine) but Mitchell, oddly, calls the stammer The Hangman. No. It is more like an iron bar. David Mitchell has never written a dull book, and this was fascinating - he uses onomatopoeia or similar, and writes about England "English church bells go 'trip, trip, dranggg and baloooom.". That is so exactly how they go. I did like that. Anyway, the book is a coming-of-age story. A boy grows up, a little. Finds out about girls, a little. Someone dies. A baby is going to be born. A family fractures. A childhood home is left behind.
Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina, was first published in Serbo-Croat in former Yugoslavia in the late 1940s. I read i t in French translation before. In the second half of 2011 I read it again in English translation. It is the story of a bridge, and of a country (Bosnia). This was a country they tried to kill. A country that barely exists. That existed (in Yugoslavia) when this book was written, but no longer does.
John Updike, Rabbit is Rich, the first Updike I have ever read, and I have to say I am a believer. Lovely writing. A discontented man. I like discontent. Here is his description of the man of the book pulling a lettuce for salad for that day's meal, in the evening "Dark green around him is damp with coming evening, though their long day's lingering brightness surprises his eye above the shadowy masses of the trees." The title notwithstanding, the man of the book is not rich, and so I wonder if the whole thing is meant to be ironic. Fantastic stuff though. Family members gather for a wedding, and Rabbit remembers a sledge (a sledge!) and a child who died sledging on their street when he was a child, and how all the children knew it, though their parents did not tell them. It is dated about finance and technology and as a book published in I think 1981 must be. People were signing mortgages at over 13 per cent.
I read a lot of American stuff in the second half of 2011, including Raymond Chandler 'Farewell My Lovely' - I very well remember the film with Robert Mitchum - "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window." And "I like smooth shiny girls, hard-boiled and loaded with sin." How excellent is that?
I read, too, Alistair Darling, "Back From The Brink,".which is much exercised by the vileness of both politics and the media. And he does not like Gordon Brown very much. I went on, still in politics, to Philip Gould, "The Unfinished Revolution". Well, Gould is dead now. And then to Chris Mullin's early diaries, because he writes very well and entertainingly, whatever I might think of him personally (a very nasty creature indeed, and he was a rubbish minister too). Mullin mentions, interestingly to me, a person called Judy Stowe, who used to be in charge of South-East Asia Stuff at the BBC World Service back in the day (Mullin has a great interest in Vietnam and is married to a Vietnamese person), I knew Judy to be a Khmer Rouge apologist of the first water, but let that pass. Mullin has the reputation of having written a pamphlet called "How to Deselect Your MP" and he clearly does not like this notion, for he reminds us that it was written in the 1970s, and was called "How to Select or Reselect Your MP". An aside on Mullin - he cites Frank Dobson as saying "Bill Clinton's only mistake was not asking Ted Kennedy to drive Monica home".
Another political book that was published in 2011 was "Prime MInister Boris and other things that never happened", an Iain Dale publication edited by Duncan Brack, to which I had the honour to contribute a chapter. It makes an interesting read. Some of the chapters are quite scholarly, and some are lighter weight.
In the second half of 2011 I had the good fortune to make a month's trip to Australia, and I read a book by Howard Jacobson "In the Land of Oz", very dated, but not uninteresting. He and his wife sit stony-faced through Crocodile Dundee, because they disapprove of it, but the blue-collar Australians around them roar with laughter and delighted recognition throughout. And Jacobson and spouse (who is Australian) despise them for it. And he is aware of the kind of traveller he has been, in his Australian odyssey - "Now I know what kind of traveller I was. I journeyed to the centre of dialogue; wherever it was I thought I'd been I'd never in fact set foot outside a conversation.".
I reviewed previously 'Ghost Map', about the cholera outbreak in London in 1854 and my hero Dr John Snow, who understood that the pump was to blame, which I followed coincidentally with 'Nemesis', by Philip Roth, about polio in New Jersey in the 1940s, a book that shocked me, because it ended so darkly, and so soon. It's a book about what "everybody knows" but which so often is not true - such as catching polio from swimming pools. Which you do not.
I read about languages too, and was pleased to be reminded of Chomsky's sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously', intended to show that a sentence can be perfectly grammatical and still mean absolutely nothing.
An interesting one was 'The Kid' by Sapphire, the story of the son of the woman she wrote about in 'Push', published in 1996 I think, which became the film 'Precious'. She is a poet, and it shows. Worth it. Though very dark.
I even read a theological commentary in 2011, on 'The Song of Songs', largely because it was written by my brother, Paul J. Griffiths, but also because this is the book from the Bible I perhaps knew the best for a long time, because RE lessons at school were so boring that we used to spend them reading the "rude bits" in the Bibles we were issued with.
And right at the end of the year I was reading Orwell's essays., This inspired me to read Dickens, which I never really have, though some of him was read to me through childhood bouts of tonsillitis. What is hugely interesting about Orwell's essays is that if he is writing, for instance, about Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer', he spends most of the essay writing about James Joyce. Could a person get away with this today? I am still reading the collected essays at the time of writing, but so far 'The Lion And The Unicorn' is what stays with me. About England. He wrote this in 1940, and says "the pacifists are mong those who wish for a Hitler victory"/
In the last two years or so I have been reading a lot of William Boyd, having read him first at the end of the 70s when he first published, gone off a couple of books ('Brazzaville Beach' and 'Stars and Bars') but have very much come back to him. A great writer and a great storyteller. I read 'Fascination', a collection of short stories. Explicit homage to Chekhov, 'Woman on the Beach with a Dog' and 'The Pigeon', a little bit self-conscious.
I finished the year re-reading Wiliam Boyd 'The New Confessions' which may be his masterpiece. Bows low to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.A whole life, and a whole century, though I suspect he wrote the same book again later, of which more, indeed, later.
That's not everything I read in the second half of 2012, but it's most of it. I did so much travelling and other work that I read less in that six months than I usually do. Making up for it now.
Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina, was first published in Serbo-Croat in former Yugoslavia in the late 1940s. I read i t in French translation before. In the second half of 2011 I read it again in English translation. It is the story of a bridge, and of a country (Bosnia). This was a country they tried to kill. A country that barely exists. That existed (in Yugoslavia) when this book was written, but no longer does.
John Updike, Rabbit is Rich, the first Updike I have ever read, and I have to say I am a believer. Lovely writing. A discontented man. I like discontent. Here is his description of the man of the book pulling a lettuce for salad for that day's meal, in the evening "Dark green around him is damp with coming evening, though their long day's lingering brightness surprises his eye above the shadowy masses of the trees." The title notwithstanding, the man of the book is not rich, and so I wonder if the whole thing is meant to be ironic. Fantastic stuff though. Family members gather for a wedding, and Rabbit remembers a sledge (a sledge!) and a child who died sledging on their street when he was a child, and how all the children knew it, though their parents did not tell them. It is dated about finance and technology and as a book published in I think 1981 must be. People were signing mortgages at over 13 per cent.
I read a lot of American stuff in the second half of 2011, including Raymond Chandler 'Farewell My Lovely' - I very well remember the film with Robert Mitchum - "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window." And "I like smooth shiny girls, hard-boiled and loaded with sin." How excellent is that?
I read, too, Alistair Darling, "Back From The Brink,".which is much exercised by the vileness of both politics and the media. And he does not like Gordon Brown very much. I went on, still in politics, to Philip Gould, "The Unfinished Revolution". Well, Gould is dead now. And then to Chris Mullin's early diaries, because he writes very well and entertainingly, whatever I might think of him personally (a very nasty creature indeed, and he was a rubbish minister too). Mullin mentions, interestingly to me, a person called Judy Stowe, who used to be in charge of South-East Asia Stuff at the BBC World Service back in the day (Mullin has a great interest in Vietnam and is married to a Vietnamese person), I knew Judy to be a Khmer Rouge apologist of the first water, but let that pass. Mullin has the reputation of having written a pamphlet called "How to Deselect Your MP" and he clearly does not like this notion, for he reminds us that it was written in the 1970s, and was called "How to Select or Reselect Your MP". An aside on Mullin - he cites Frank Dobson as saying "Bill Clinton's only mistake was not asking Ted Kennedy to drive Monica home".
Another political book that was published in 2011 was "Prime MInister Boris and other things that never happened", an Iain Dale publication edited by Duncan Brack, to which I had the honour to contribute a chapter. It makes an interesting read. Some of the chapters are quite scholarly, and some are lighter weight.
In the second half of 2011 I had the good fortune to make a month's trip to Australia, and I read a book by Howard Jacobson "In the Land of Oz", very dated, but not uninteresting. He and his wife sit stony-faced through Crocodile Dundee, because they disapprove of it, but the blue-collar Australians around them roar with laughter and delighted recognition throughout. And Jacobson and spouse (who is Australian) despise them for it. And he is aware of the kind of traveller he has been, in his Australian odyssey - "Now I know what kind of traveller I was. I journeyed to the centre of dialogue; wherever it was I thought I'd been I'd never in fact set foot outside a conversation.".
I reviewed previously 'Ghost Map', about the cholera outbreak in London in 1854 and my hero Dr John Snow, who understood that the pump was to blame, which I followed coincidentally with 'Nemesis', by Philip Roth, about polio in New Jersey in the 1940s, a book that shocked me, because it ended so darkly, and so soon. It's a book about what "everybody knows" but which so often is not true - such as catching polio from swimming pools. Which you do not.
I read about languages too, and was pleased to be reminded of Chomsky's sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously', intended to show that a sentence can be perfectly grammatical and still mean absolutely nothing.
An interesting one was 'The Kid' by Sapphire, the story of the son of the woman she wrote about in 'Push', published in 1996 I think, which became the film 'Precious'. She is a poet, and it shows. Worth it. Though very dark.
I even read a theological commentary in 2011, on 'The Song of Songs', largely because it was written by my brother, Paul J. Griffiths, but also because this is the book from the Bible I perhaps knew the best for a long time, because RE lessons at school were so boring that we used to spend them reading the "rude bits" in the Bibles we were issued with.
And right at the end of the year I was reading Orwell's essays., This inspired me to read Dickens, which I never really have, though some of him was read to me through childhood bouts of tonsillitis. What is hugely interesting about Orwell's essays is that if he is writing, for instance, about Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer', he spends most of the essay writing about James Joyce. Could a person get away with this today? I am still reading the collected essays at the time of writing, but so far 'The Lion And The Unicorn' is what stays with me. About England. He wrote this in 1940, and says "the pacifists are mong those who wish for a Hitler victory"/
In the last two years or so I have been reading a lot of William Boyd, having read him first at the end of the 70s when he first published, gone off a couple of books ('Brazzaville Beach' and 'Stars and Bars') but have very much come back to him. A great writer and a great storyteller. I read 'Fascination', a collection of short stories. Explicit homage to Chekhov, 'Woman on the Beach with a Dog' and 'The Pigeon', a little bit self-conscious.
I finished the year re-reading Wiliam Boyd 'The New Confessions' which may be his masterpiece. Bows low to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.A whole life, and a whole century, though I suspect he wrote the same book again later, of which more, indeed, later.
That's not everything I read in the second half of 2012, but it's most of it. I did so much travelling and other work that I read less in that six months than I usually do. Making up for it now.
Saturday, 7 January 2012
Priors Gardens
is the name of my novel, out today on Kindle. Someone who has just had a look at it described it as "Take Three Girls", and maybe it is a bit like that. It is a story of the baby boom. We boomers have not tended to create much fiction. We have been more of an activist generation. But perhaps now is the time for us to write our stories, and to write the stories that move us. Anyway, I have written one. You can get it here.
Friday, 6 January 2012
give her back the time she's done
Rebecca Leighton, a nurse at Stepping Hill hospital in the north-west of England, was jailed for six weeks last year on suspicion of tampering with saline solutions and drips and causing the deaths of a number of patients. Why she was suspected I don't know. But she was vilified, pictures from her Facebook page published everywhere - I know what she looks like for that reason - and more than one newspaper appeared to think her guilty. Public hatred was such that she was not released from prison as early as she might have been because a judge thought she would be safer inside. Well, guess what, it turns out she was innocent - she was released last September because there was not enough evidence to continue to treat her as a suspect - and another nurse is now being questioned about the matter. It also appears that a great many more people may have died as a result of this murderous activity than was at first believed.
Rebecca Leighton appears to be fortunate in that she has a family and a partner who have stood by her, despite her "party lifestyle" as the media described it. Those who are alone when something like this happens to them are not so lucky, as Christopher Jefferies found out the previous year when various newspapers decided that he had killed his tenant Joanna Yeates. And he had not. Glad to say the actual murderer is now doing time. And since when does a "party lifestyle" make you more likely to be a murderer? Sickening. Shameful.
Rebecca Leighton appears to be fortunate in that she has a family and a partner who have stood by her, despite her "party lifestyle" as the media described it. Those who are alone when something like this happens to them are not so lucky, as Christopher Jefferies found out the previous year when various newspapers decided that he had killed his tenant Joanna Yeates. And he had not. Glad to say the actual murderer is now doing time. And since when does a "party lifestyle" make you more likely to be a murderer? Sickening. Shameful.
Thursday, 5 January 2012
Mr Caramel's loose talk
 |
| Francois Hollande |
Francois Hollande, who as readers will know is the Socialist party candidate (and current front runner) for President of France, to be elected in May this year, has changed his style, after a soft start (to which he owes his "caramel" nickname). He spoke in Merignac to a packed hall of 1400 supporters, some of whom were waving banners, and there was a lot of pointing, and a louder voice. Well, good. But he still looks to me as though he is reacting to whatever criticism the media have, rather than setting the agenda, as someone who wants to be a world statesman should do. Perhaps aware of this himself, he had lunch with a bunch of journalists on Tuesday. Now if you had spent any time interested in politics in the UK you would expect that what he had to say at that lunch would then appear, carefully managed, in selected media outlets. Well, this is France, and these lunches and dinners happen all the time, and very rarely does anything appear, because journalists like to protect the privacy of politicians. Hmmm. A different culture. Discuss. Anyway, what emerged from this lunch, and appeared in Le Parisien yesterday Wednesday, was that Hollande allegedly referred to Sarkozy as a "sale mec". This was quickly denied by several, but not all, of the journalists who were there. It was equally quickly seized upon by Sarko's people, who demanded a public apology "excuses publiques". Le Monde today takes the opportunity to report this, and to praise the UMP rebuttal strategy "la riposte systematique" which has roared into operation ahead of Sarko himself declaring his candidacy, expected next month. Apparently there are no more press releases or lines to take "elements de langage" in written form, it is all done by telephone and text message.
Oh, and "sale mec", I hear you ask? Hard to translate. "Mec" is simply colloquial for a male person. "Sale" means "dirty" and also has the connotation of "badly behaved", a naughty child may be referred to as a "sale gosse". Anyway, it's not a nice thing to say. Google Translate says it is "dirty guy", which sounds frightfully camp. I would translate it as "a shit".
Nice one Francois. Watch your step.
Monday, 2 January 2012
sloppy over Feltham
"it should be remembered that Feltham and Heston was a Tory seat in both 1983 and 1997", says former Labour councillor John Howarth (prop. Public Impact Ltd, remember "Your Better Off With Labour"?) writing on his blog about the by-election in that constituency last month, caused by the death of its Labour MP Alan Keen. Except that it wasn't. Alan Keen took the seat from the Tories in 1992. Howarth couldn't bring himself to mention the name of Alan Keen, because Howarth's precious boy Martin Salter wanted to be the candidate there in 1992, and despite some seriously dirty tricks, in which Mr Howarth was also very much involved, failed in that ambition. So not only is Mr Howarth engaging in cheap spite, he is too lazy to check his facts. Quite in character. I wouldn't even post about him if his blog accepted comments, but he is in the Reading Labour mode of broadcast, not receive. You can read the shite for yourself here. He is also, I notice, serialising a piece of fiction. I wonder where he got that idea?
He ends the post by patronising the victorious Labour candidate in Feltham and Heston (well, she is only a girl, and not even entirely white it seems):
Finally, It’s worth congratulating Labour’s Seema Malhotra, an obviously bright woman who could go far.
and finishes with an asterisk (although there is no asterisk earlier in the text) and a weak attempt to justify his own laziness:
* Apologies to readers for a few more typos than normal in my first draft - I’m putting it down to using an iPad touch screen thing with a will of its own.
No. Typos are in a text because the person responsible for that text failed to check for them and get rid of them. Anyone can do that. It's got nothing to do with iPads. I've been using one of those since 2010 and haven't produced any more typos than I did before. Lazy arse. Unprofessional.
He ends the post by patronising the victorious Labour candidate in Feltham and Heston (well, she is only a girl, and not even entirely white it seems):
Finally, It’s worth congratulating Labour’s Seema Malhotra, an obviously bright woman who could go far.
and finishes with an asterisk (although there is no asterisk earlier in the text) and a weak attempt to justify his own laziness:
* Apologies to readers for a few more typos than normal in my first draft - I’m putting it down to using an iPad touch screen thing with a will of its own.
No. Typos are in a text because the person responsible for that text failed to check for them and get rid of them. Anyone can do that. It's got nothing to do with iPads. I've been using one of those since 2010 and haven't produced any more typos than I did before. Lazy arse. Unprofessional.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)