Engaging Voices

While having a coffee in a small cafe in Cambridge, I came across a lovely thought provoking journal. I noticed from its webpage the following which I thought was worth showing in full and definitely food for thought. 

Why Wisdom?

"Fashionable intellectuals today treat all ideas as fads. Alas, it’s a zeitgeist that’s conducive not to responsible thinkers but rather provocateurs, who do little of substance to foster the kind of humanity they claim to profess. Sensationalising not explaining, bamboozling not enlightening, berating not inspiring: society’s moralising has been entrusted to the likes of radical postmodernists, religious fundamentalists and political extremists, all of whom fit and shape the virulent modern media, even as they critique it.
Yet beneath this entanglement of weeds, wisdom endures: civilisation’s forgotten monument. Inscribed on it are history’s most profound existential lessons – thoughtful, conscientious and deep, yet down-to-earth, concrete and practical. There are homely meditations on how to live a meaningful, happy and good life. There are simple teachings on how to get the best out of oneself and others; to create more of the things that make life worthwhile – such as beauty, love, labour, compassion, peace and learning. And there are insights into human nature and how it can be channelled into achieving all this.
Through contributions from academics and other professionals – responsible intellectuals alike – the Journal of Modern Wisdom seeks to cut through the faddish brambles; to recover, reassert and redevelop wiser ways of living. Because ideas matter. And wisdom is the most valuable thing people can reflect on – and in doing so, with hope, achieve"

http://www.modernwisdom.co.uk/

A Future Generation and "Fantastic Mr Fox"

On an apparently ordinary train journey back from the north of England yesterday, there was a young family sat in front of me; a mother with her little son I guess around 5 or 6 and her daughter who looked a year or so older. Nothing unusual there but there were no computer games and no mobile phones. In fact the little girl was reading a children's book by Roald Dahl and the son was playing word games with his mother. For most of the three and a half hour journey, the mother continued to encourage the children to read and to engage with language and with no electronic media. I thought these children could well be destined for real future careers. Perhaps it's worth mentioning too that the family were second or third generation South Asian and such a fine family too.  

Reading a Russian novel on a Spanish island

While I was reading Saturday's Guardian newspaper I came across an engaging little piece on a writer's experience of reading on a relatively remote Spanish island. It was actually Formentera, one of the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean. 

"It was early summer and I'd gone on holiday to the island of Formentera, feeling particularly ragged and exhausted after a play I'd written, acted in and produced. I booked to stay in the same hotel I'd stayed in as a child, not knowing for sure if there were any other hotels, and arrived to find that it was on the top of a hill almost an hour's walk from the coast. So every day I set off with my costume, a towel and a book – Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and spent the afternoon lying on the beach immersed in Russia, romance, philosophy and suspense. As the days passed, these worlds began to tangle together, Anna's soaring feelings for Vronsky, the white sand of the beach, Levin's discourses on nature, a quick, cold dip in the sea. I never think now about Kitty's frustrations, or the terrible suffering of Anna as she is forced to choose between her lover and her child, without remembering the long trudge up the hill to La Mola, and the sense of peace as I sat on the terrace eking out the last pages in the fading light. I arrived back in London, refreshed and restored; though I've never been back to Formentera, I've reread Anna Karenina many times."

 (Esther Freud)

To read the summer book recommendations by various writers and artists then try:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/17/best-holiday-reads?INTCMP=SRCH

A Great Idea at a Railway Station in 1935

It's incredible to think that such a fine publishing house as Penguin Books all started in 1935 while Allen Lane was waiting for a train at Exeter station in Devon.  I actually discovered this article on the back cover of the novel I'm reading at the moment. He clearly had a great idea and was able to see a definite niche in the market. Walk into any bookshop in the UK today to see just how popular Penguin paperbacks are today.


"In 1935, if you wanted to read a good book, you needed either a lot of money or a library card. Cheap paperbacks were available, but their poor production generally tended to mirror the quality between the covers.
Penguin paperbacks were the brainchild of Allen Lane, then a director of The Bodley Head. After a weekend visiting Agatha Christie in Devon, he found himself on a platform at Exeter station searching its bookstall for something to read on his journey back to London, but discovered only popular magazines and reprints of Victorian novels.
Appalled by the selection on offer, Lane decided that good quality contemporary fiction should be made available at an attractive price and sold not just in traditional bookshops, but also in railway stations, tobacconists and chain stores.
He also wanted a 'dignified but flippant' symbol for his new business. His secretary suggested a Penguin and another employee was sent to London Zoo to make some sketches. Seventy years later Penguin is still one of the most recognizable brands in the world.
The first Penguin paperbacks appeared in the summer of 1935 and included works by Ernest Hemingway, André Maurois and Agatha Christie. They were colour coded (orange for fiction, blue for biography, green for crime) and cost just sixpence, the same price as a packet of cigarettes. The way the public thought about books changed forever - the paperback revolution had begun."

What if you had no right to read?

According to Alberto Manguel, "stories are our memory, libraries are the storerooms of that memory, and reading is the craft by means of which we can recreate that memory...by translating it back into our own experience." ('City of Words') Here I'm reminded of a novel I read some years ago by the American writer Ray Bradbury and one that has often resonated with me. He describes a society in which all books are burnt as they are considered to encourage independent thought and are therefore dangerous to the central power of the State. Information is controlled by the State and people receive their daily dosage of news/information via a wall screen which every household is encouraged to have. Yet outside of the city an underground movement grows and libraries are maintained through memory as each person has memorised a complete book or work of literature. Considering that the book was written in the 1950s, Ray Bradbury shows real and chilling foresight when you reflect upon the growing popularity of huge plasma screen televisions today.

Alberto Manguel on Reading.

Alberto Manguel is one of my favourite writers~he always has interesting things to say on all things literary. I found this article on the homepage of his website and I think it's worth quoting in full so see what you think.

"Manguel believes in the central importance of the book in societies of the written word where, in recent times, the intellectual act has lost most of its prestige. Libraries (the reservoirs of collective memory) should be our essential symbol, not banks. Humans can be defined as reading animals, come into the world to decipher it and themselves. The battle of every reader is therefore against the enforced education of stupidity in a consumer society that tries to turn every citizen into a buying automat incapable of reflection. In that sense, the act of reading becomes subversive, since it can lead to questioning and thinking for oneself. The enemy is not, as some would want us to believe, the electronic technology. Manguel argues that the electronic technology is not in competition with the technology of the book: they apply to different fields of creative pursuit and overlap only occasionally; the perceived antagonism between both is fostered by mercantile interests to promote the sale of electronic products, constantly updated less for scientific or intellectual reasons than for purely commercial ones -- to sell more computers, not to elicit more ideas. Manguel also believes in the intrinsic illuminating and healing quality of literate texts when they allow constantly renewed readings and in-depth exploration. By literate text, Manguel means that which Northrop Frye defined as a classic: "a work whose circumference is always greater than that of the best of its readers." In his book Into the Looking-Glass Wood, Manguel wrote: "In the midst of uncertainty and many kinds of fear, threatened by loss, change and the welling of pain within and without for which one can offer no comfort, readers know that at least there are, here and there, a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink, to grant us roof and board in our passage through the dark and nameless wood." (Jean-Luc Terradillos)

http://www.alberto.manguel.com/

A Good Read

I've just started this novel and I'm impressed. I like the way that the story evolves from the characters' minds so the author keeps herself at a distance. The tense atmosphere of the setting too helps to create a three dimensional view of Leningrad in the former Soviet Union. The author has done her research too as there is an extensive bibliography at the back of the novel; how often do you see that nowadays? So it's a definite recommendation. It also seems to be a very domestic novel almost like a Vermeer painting with its intense focus on the domestic setting of the growing family so it's quite an education too for me. 
Anyway it's time for lunch and then the cinema to see The Illusionist a French animation that so many people are talking about now.  

On Writing and the film "Finding Forrester"

It's amazing how certain images from films, novels,poems or paintings stay with you. I remember seeing the film "Finding Forrester" where a former prize winning author helps a young basketball player and aspiring writer to escape from his life in the Bronx, New York. The former author watches the young man at the typewriter and he's just sitting there waiting for inspiration. "What are you doing man, the first rule of writing is to write. First you write from your heart then you write with your head." So he taps away at the typewriter just putting in his immediate thoughts as they come to him and after he can proofread or amend if necessary. It's the problem with some writing nowadays as the writer has intellectually poured over every word the finished article is in danger of becoming artificial and stilted or even worse: unreadable.

So thanks for the prompt from the filmaker(s) of  "Finding Forrester." I'm going to check now to see if the film was based on a novel. 

Holiday Time

I seem to be doing a lot more reading and artwork lately. It's great to be off work for a while though;ideal opportunity to chill out and catch up... I also seem to be living like a bat by staying up until the early hours and getting up at... best not say...need to go to the gym tomorrow and then onto Pilates. Anyway back to the reading...