However, before we get started with what I hope will be a flurry of new reviews and discussion I thought I better pop some thoughts down about our rather subdued Manchester Book Club meet last Tuesday…

Apart from Bulgakov’s masterpiece The Master and Margarita that Alex very smartly selected for us a couple of months ago, out of what has been a very diverse selection from our little Book Group, Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains has been my favourite choice by far. Written in 1935 as the first of his ‘Berlin Novels’ (Goodbye to Berlin being the second) Isherwood writes the story of his alter-ego, teacher William Bradshaw who, on a train travelling from Holland into Berlin, encounters and subsequently forms an intriguing friendship with Arthur Norris; a hilarious, evasive, effeminate and often rather sinister middle aged man.

As the mystique surrounding his new found friend and his occupation grows, Bradshaw follows Arthur around pre-war Berlin. From party to restaurant to communist hub, this story is imbued with tension and populated with characters whose appearance seemed so grotesque as to be rather cartoon-like at times:

‘There was no mistaking his warmth. He had a large blunt fleshy nose and a chin which seemed to have slipped sideways. It was like a broken concertina. When he spoke, it jerked crooked in the most curious fashion and a deep cleft dimple like a wound surprisingly appeared in the side of it. Above his ripe red cheeks, his forehead was sculpturally white, like marble. A queerly cut fringe of dark grey hair lay across it, compact, thick, and heavy. After a moment’s examination, I realised, with extreme interest, that he was wearing a wig.’

(Bradshaw meets Arthur Norris) p.3

Having little time to concentrate on anything major this month (a nightmare of a mood to be in when you’re trying to read Salman Rushdie!) Christopher Isherwood proved to be the perfect antidote. His prose is neat and evocative, his characters unusual and the setting exciting. However, it appears that that is all there really was to it! Although a couple of our book group members found Arthur Norris a difficult character to get along with, spoiling the book somewhat for them, the majority found this to be an entertaining read but were unable to elaborate as to exactly why it was so enjoyable, myself included!

Although William Bradshaw is supposed to be Isherwood’s alter-ego (Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood) the author very cleverly ensures that his narrator is as neutral, unexciting  and asexual as possible; allowing the big personalities of the novel to shine and for us, as readers, to easily place ourselves in Bradshaw’s position. Hobnobbing with Arthur, his communist ‘associates’ and the fishy Baron Pregnitz in the cafés and bars of 1935 Berlin, it is fascinating to see Isherwood effectively portray the danger and tension of the place at the time, particularly given what we all know about what happened next… 

Isherwood criticised himself intensely later on in life for what he felt was a naive portrayal of this historically significant and harrowing period. I personally feel he was rather harsh on himself. Although the tension we all picked up on in the novel may have been amplified by our own knowledge of Germany under the Nazis; despite the amusing characters and bizarre situations they find themselves in, behind the action in Mr Norris Changes Trains lies a disarming honesty and darkness that betrays genuine acknowledgement of the very real danger lurking in the background. After all, how was he to understand the full extent what would eventually happen come 1939…!?

Isherwood has been introduced to me at the perfect time in my life (thank you Jess!) Writing with simplicity and a unique sense of style, Goodbye to Berlin and A Single Man have now taken pride of place on my wish list.

I stated meditating in earnest when I was 20 years old, that makes it about 37 years now.

I’ve been taught by a Jain Guru, A Zen Master, a TM renegade, and a couple of other gurus. I’ve been in the presence of the Dalai Lama, followed the teachings of Yogananda with Kriya Yoga, and been hugged by a Yogi/Saint named Amma. I once took almost a year off training martial arts to devote to yoga and meditation.

How do I blend meditation and martial arts now? Like I said, I meditate almost daily, but I don’t meditate just before a practice session, or even right after. I find the two activities counterproductive. It has to do with what I feel is the goal, and after effects of meditation.

Some clarification is called for at this point. Meditation refers to both an activity, and a state of being, and often both simultaneously. As an activity, it is not “wordy.” It is not telling yourself a message over and over, that is affirmation and is a different thing. It is not “talking to god” or praying. It is not reciting prose or scripture. Meditation as I’ve been taught, regardless of method used, is about stillness, awakened, alert, stillness.

I once visited a Zen master after having already studied some meditation with others. When in the meditation hall, before we started, I asked what technique should I use, a particular breathing pattern, a visualization, an internal or external mantra..? In classic Zen master fashion the answer came: “Shut up, don’t move muscle, don’t move mind!” It was a shock to my system. It also helped solidify the idea that meditation as an activity is mostly non activity. You don’t do affirmation, you don’t “psyche yourself up,” you don’t go into trance or do self hypnosis, you don’t read or memorize texts. All these other activities have their own merits, in their own time, but are not truly meditation. Attempts to define them as meditation are wrong, and including them in the slot of time we give for meditation is a disservice to the practice.

So why don’t I meditate right before or after practice? I’ll mention a few reasons.

First, spending a bit of quality time in the practice of stillness should have a lingering after effect of calmness and tranquility. My martial arts practices are very dynamic, energetic, driven, physically and mentally demanding, and often require a quality of explosiveness. Usually coming out of a meditation session I feel a kind of bliss that I am not eager to just toss aside. I want as much bliss as I can get for as long as I can get it. But I am a a reasonable person with a material life, and can’t go about my day with a spaced out look in my eye, smile on my face and holding a flower. So for a couple of minutes after meditation, sometimes longer, I’ll ease my way into my worldly affairs. I don’t just bounce from meditation to sparring, like I know some do or try. I think its kind of a waste of the meditation activity.

Second, one of my gurus understood that we are not in the time and place where everyone can just retire to a cave and just come out with a begging bowl for daily food. He taught us that your meditation activity (and state of being) should infuse your whole day and life, not occupy it. He taught us that 24 minutes meditation a day could be sufficient to affect your 24 hours. Sure, more is better, but how much more? For what? If you really want so much more then become a monk…

Third, I accept a distinction between concentration, meditation, and absorption. They are all part of the meditation experience. When we start the training we generally start by concentrating, whether on a sound, sight, idea, breath concept, or even on “not move mind, not move muscle.” Concentration can progress or morph to the state of meditation. This is where what you were concentrating on has arrived, where stillness is not a word or an attempted goal, but the state of being. You are still, alert and aware, tranquil. Absorption is a deeper still state, and one that you might functionally carry with you 24/7, the meditative state and your “normal” state are one and without conflict.

I don’t have my reference handy, a translation and commentary on Patanjali‘s Sutras called “How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali by Swami Prabhavananda, Christopher Isherwood”  but somewhere in there they state something like a few seconds of the meditative state may be called concentration, a few minutes of the meditative state, may be called meditation, and longer may be called absorption (samhadi for those into exotic words).

That all said, I meditate regularly but not just pre or post martial arts. That, I think, would be like going on a diet this afternoon to look great on a date tonight, or exercising the whole body to loose weight on just one arm…

For martial arts practice and training I take a couple of deep breaths, “psych myself up” sometimes, affirm my goals or desires, all this taking only a few seconds, then go into raising my heart rate, oxygenating my blood and brain with breathing, warming up my muscles with bouncing and stretching, then proceeding to the learning and practice of explosive, violent, combative skills training I also have as a part of my life.

Meditation, I did it eight hours ago, I still have some of that with me and I’m on to other stuff, like hitting and trying not to get hit…

Next time, I’ll post an actual meditative technique…

1278 Ladislaus IV of Hungary and Rudolph I of Germany defeated Premysl Ottokar II of Bohemia in the Battle of Marchfield near Dürnkrut in (then) Moravia.

1346  Hundred Years’ War: the military supremacy of the English longbow over the French combination of crossbow and armoured knights was established at the Battle of Crécy.

1498  Michelangelo was commissioned to carve the Pietà.

1676 Robert Walpole, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was born (d. 1745).

1768 The HM Bark Endeavour expedition under Captain James Cook set sail from England.

1778 The first recorded ascent of Triglav, the highest mountain in Slovenia.

1789  Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen approved by National Assembly at Palace of Versailles.

1819 Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Consort of the United Kingdom, was born (d. 1861).

1858 First news dispatch by telegraph.

1862 American Civil War: the Second Battle of Bull Run began.

1865 Arthur James Arnot, Scottish inventor, was born (d. 1946).

1866 – After two bungled attempts and near disaster at sea, the first communications cable between the North and South Islands of New Zealand   was completed.

1875 John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, Scottish novelist, Governor General of Canada, was born (d. 1940).

1883 The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa began its final, paroxysmal, stage.

1894 The second Maori King, Tukaroto Matutaera Potatau Te Wherowhero Tawhiao, died.

1898 Peggy Guggenheim, American art collector, was born (d. 1979).

1904 Christopher Isherwood, English-born writer, was born (d. 1986).

1906 Albert Sabin, American polio researcher, was born (d. 1993).

1910 Mother Teresa, Nobel Peace Prize winning Christian missionary, was born (d. 1997).

1911 – The New Zealand Coat of Arms was warranted.

1914  World War I: the German colony of Togoland was invaded by French and British forces.

1920  The 19th amendment to United States Constitution took effect, giving women the right to vote.

1940 Chad was the first French colony to join the Allies under the administration of Félix Éboué, France’s first black colonial governor.

1942  Holocaust in Chortkiv, western Ukraine: At 2.30 am the German Schutzpolizei started driving Jews out of their houses, divided them into groups of 120, packed them in freight cars and deported 2000 to Belzec death camp; 500 of the sick and children weremurdered on the spot.

1944 World War II: Charles de Gaulle entered Paris.

1957 The USSR announced the successful test of an ICBM – a “super long distance intercontinental multistage ballistic rocket … a few days ago,” according to the Soviet news agency, ITAR-TASS.

1970  The then new feminist movement, led by Betty Friedan, led a nation-wide Women’s Strike for Equality.

1977  The Charter of the French Language was adopted by the National Assembly of Quebec

1978   Pope John Paul I was elected to the Papacy.

1978 – Sigmund Jähn became first German cosmonaut on board of the Soyuz 31 spacecraft.

1980  Macaulay Culkin, American actor, was born.

1982 David Long, New Zealand musician, was born.

1992 Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar signed agreement of split of Czechoslovakia in Brno.

1997  Beni-Ali massacre in Algeria; 60-100 people killed.

1999 – Russia began the Second Chechen War in response to the Invasion of Dagestan by the Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade.

2002 – Earth Summit 2002 began in Johannesburg.

2011 – The Boeing 787 Dreamliner, Boeing’s all-new composite airliner, received certification from the EASA and the FAA.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

As you can probably guess from my utter contempt at the 50 shades series, I decided not to torture myself with the 2^nd and 3^rd ‘novels’ instead opting for something a little better written…

`The Princess Bride’ (the `good parts’ version) abridged by William Goldman has been sat on my shelf for about a year; recommended to me by a friend who also introduced me to the film, I’ve finally gotten round to reading it, and I’ve very much enjoyed it. I’d be interested to find a copy of the English translation of the full manuscript by S. Morgenstern; but Goldman’s adaptation has been really entertaining and gripping; and I would definitely recommend it as for a little light hearted fiction.

A very different read, Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ (including other short stories) is just as brilliant. I first discovered Angela Carter a couple of years ago when I stumbled upon ‘The Magic Toyshop’ quite by chance (and definitely not a children’s book, so don’t be fooled by the title or the cover; just read the first page if you don’t believe me), and this is the only other of her works I’ve read so far (I say read, I’ve not finished it yet; but the 3 short stories I have completed so far have been perfect). A must read if you like weird, slightly disturbing and magically written literature. (In which case I must also recommend Jeanette Winterson, a magnificent writer whom I could read all day long)

Down in London last week when I went to watch the women’s marathon (I didn’t manage to get tickets for anything else) I wandered round the book stools near the South Bank Centre and came across an author and book I’d not heard of before. `Mr Norris Changes Trains’ by Isherwood (Who, it turns out, wrote `A Single Man’ which the film of the same title (which I have seen and own on DVD) was based on) was originally published in 1933 and is set in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. The first five chapters have been intriguing and entertaining and there is a sense of danger lurking just out of reach, and I can’t wait to delve farther into the story.

And finally, the fourth book I’ve currently got underway is Tracey Emin’s `My Life in a Column’. I already know a reasonably amount about Tracey Emin (I read her `Strangeland’ not long ago (read it, it’s fantastic)) but this publication gives further and continuing insight into her wonderful and sad, fantastic and turbulent life. Her writing style is entertaining and erratic, often jumping from thought to thought in a stream of conscious, which suits me down to the ground. And each entry is really short, so for someone with a short attention span it is perfect. Again, this is another Book I can definitely recommend.

For a man who has a Wikipedia page just as detailed as the pages of the authors he inspired, instead of telling you who “Denny” was, I’ll share with you information about the book from its own Preface which puts him into perspective quite nicely:

The Best-Kept Boy in the World is the first book ever written about Denham (Denny) Fouts (1914-1948), the twentieth century’s most famous male prostitute. He was a socialite and muse whose extraordinary life started off humbly in Jacksonville, Florida. But in short order he befriend (and bedded) the rich and celebrated and in the process conquered the world.

No less an august figure than the young Gore Vidal was enchanted by Denny’s special charms. He twice modeled characters on Denny in his fiction, saying it was a pity that Denny never wrote a memoir. To Vidal he was “un homme fatal.”

Truman Capote, who devoted a third of Answered Prayers to Denny’s life story, found that “to watch him walk into a room was an experience. He was beyond being good-looking; he was the single most charming-looking person I’ve ever seen.”

Writer Christopher Isherwood, who Denny considered his best friend, was more to the point: he called him “the most expensive male prostitute in the world.” He thus served as the source for the character Paul in Isherwood’s novel Down There on a Visit and appears as himself frequently in his published diaries.

But Denny’s conquests were not limited to the US alone.

Somerset Maugham in England has Denny in his celebrated novel The Razor’s Edge.

To King Paul of Greece he was “my dear Denham” or “Darling Denham,” and the King’s telegrams to Denny from the Royal Palace always were signed “love, Paul.”

Peter Watson, the wealthy financial backer of the popular British literary magazine Horizon, had an erection whenever he was in the same room with Denny.

The artist Michael Wishart met Denny for the first time at a party in Paris and realized instantly he was in love and that “the only place in the world I wanted to be was in Denham’s bedroom.”

And Lord Tredegar, one of the largest landowners in Great Britain, saw Denny being led by the police through the lobby of an expensive hotel in Capri, convinced the police to let him pay the bills Denny owed, and then took Denny to accompany him and his wife as they continued on their tour of the world.

It was because of lofty connections such as these that Capote echoed Isherwood’s remark by quipping that Denny was the “best-kept boy in the world,” thereby coming up with the title of the chapter in Answered Prayers about Denny.

In his short life, Denny achieved a mythic status, and this book follows him into his rarified world of barons and shipping tycoons, lords, princes, heirs of great fortunes, artists, and authors. Here is the story of an American original, a story with an amazing cast of unforgettable characters and extraordinary settings, the book Gore Vidal wished Denny had written.

Denny never did write his own story, but he does move through many memoirs of the times. And for some of the most renowned authors of those times, he was a muse, and that color he brought into a squirrel-gray world inspired them to capture him in their prose. Denny is “Paul” in Christopher Isherwood’s Down There on a Visit. He is a character in Gore Vidal’s novel The Judgment of Paris, and in his short story “Pages from an Abandoned Journal”. He appears in Truman Capote’s infamous Answered Prayers on which the author was working, or not working, when he died. He was proud to find himself a character in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.

To be immortalized in a story by a famed author would be enough to earn a footnote in literary history. To have inspired the body of work Denham Fouts did is to become a legend. This is his story.

***

I first met Denny (not in a physical sense) when I became acquainted with Truman Capote back in college. While Denny would just be a common boy toy today, I was mesmerized by the fact that so many men were so enamored by him and wrote about him. Think of him as what Marilyn Monroe was back in the day, or any big Hollywood star that everyone was in love with for that matter.  Only he wasn’t famous.

He must have had just a magnetic personality out of this world and much charisma because I don’t really find him all that attractive. Not attractive enough to stop wars anyway!

But today we are so desensitized by sex thanks to television and the internet which makes it so readily available. Too much of a good thing?  I’d long for the day where a simple boy crush on a man among friends did it for me.

So I’m excited that someone has finally written a book ABOUT Denny! I look forward to reading it.

Cabaret, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1967, is a musical adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories” and John van Druten’s I Am a Camera.  It features a book by Joe Masteroff and score by John Kander and Fred Ebb.

Producer Vince Insalaco and director Robert Hupp have assembled a cast and creative team to transform the Argenta Community Theatre into the Kit Kat Klub.  The choreographers are Marisa Kirby and Christen Burke Pitts with Kurt Kennedy serving as musical director.

Kirby leads the cast as tragic heroine Sally Bowles. Cipher-like scribe Cliff Bradshaw is played by Michael Klucher.  Brandon Higdem is the leering MC of the Kit Kat Klub.  Also starring are Tricia Spione and Alan Rackley as a mismatched pair of older Germans struggling with their relationship in the midst of the onset of the Third Reich.

Others in the cast are David Weatherly, Jessica Smith, Carl Carter, Matt Morley, Kris Waltermire, Dylan Dugger, Sydney Ippolito, Emily Karnes, Bailey Lamb, RaeLeigh Narisi, Rachel Powell and Brittany “Sparkles” Rorie.

Insalaco hopes to produce a musical and a play at the Argenta Community Theatre each year.

‘After many a summer 

George rolls the words off his tongue with such hammy harmonics, such shameless relish, that this sounds like a parody of W.B. Yeats reciting.

-A Single Man (1964) by Christopher Isherwood

Part of the reason that I was led to this novel, apart from of course my admiration for Huxley as a novelist, was the mention of After Many a Summer (1939) in Christopher Isherwood’s beautiful book A Single Man. It has to be admitted that Isherwood was never especially impressed with the novels of his friend Aldous Huxley. Isherwood complains in his diary of After Many a Summer as being “a prim, chilly morality play.” His characters simply don’t live, Isherwood complains. Huxley is not as popular as many of his contemporaries: Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence. The exception to this is his brilliant Brave New World (1932), a classic in dystopian fiction often whispered in the same breath as George Orwell’s Nighteen Eighty-Four (1949). You should, incidentally, read both. Huxley was the master of the novel of ideas. His work is for the cerebral among us, those that value what A.S Byatt terms ‘the life of the mind’. What Huxley keeps us aware of, in my view, is that thinking is an important part of our lives as human beings. The questions that he raises, the intellectual conundrums, and puzzling them out are part of what a human life is.

Aldous Huxley was one of the greatest public intellectuals of his age. His biographer Nicholas Murray describes him as “a kind of conduit or link between the world of high Victorian liberal intellectualism and the world of the twentieth century, whose course those ardent, progressively-minded meliorists could not have predicted.” He is suspicious of ideology: he doesn’t toe the line of the right or of the left, but channels and transmutes the Victorian liberalism of the old. Huxley’s characters attempt to envisage alternatives to the status quo. Indeed, in his final novel Island (1962) he portrays what he considers to be his Utopia, or rather what he terms his Topia – a place that isn’t merely abstract, ideal, unworkable, but that he also thought practical. A place rather than no place, to translate the Greek. So what are the ideas wrestled with in this novel?

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939) or After Many a Summer as it was entitled in the United Kingdom is a novel about mortality. This difference in title highlights a possible quibble. Can this novel be described as a British novel considering it occurred after Huxley’s move to America? It’s a problem that confronts us in relation to many writers of the twentieth century, particularly in regard to those who are Trans-Atlantic such as Henry James, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. At what point does a British writer become an American writer, and vice versa? Is citizenship enough? Or do writers somehow transcend their national boundaries in some way? Questions with no doubt with complex and difficult answers, but ones that I’m perfectly willing to bulldoze  to include the novel on the list to be able to see Huxley’s satirical mind that he applied to the upper classes of the England of the twenties move its gaze to Hollywood.

 The first port of call for his Englishman, a historian called Jeremy Pordage, in America is a gigantic theme park of a cemetery built by the American millionaire Jo Stoyte who brings all the characters together. This sets the tone of the novel: juxtaposing excess to a level of absurdity with the shadow of impending death. Huxley notes amusingly of the cemetery that: “The Moslem paradise had had copulations six centuries long. In this new Christian heaven, progress, no doubt, would have stepped up the period to a millennium and added the joys of everlasting tennis, eternal golf and swimming.” I have to say that eternal golf seems like something more appropriate to one of Dante’s circles of Hell, but to each their own. Jo Stoyte has a pathological terror of death. Stoyte fears “Death and that flame coloured text in his bedroom at home. Terrible to fall into the hands of the living God – not Prudence’s God, of course; the other one, the real one, the God of his father and his grandmother.”  He also has a temper which he controls by reminding himself “God is love; there is no death” if only because he has been warned that stress could shorten his lifespan. This warning comes from his physician Dr. Sigmund Obispo who specialises in longevity who is researching ways to extend human life.

The characters of Huxley’s novels are thinkers of one kind or another. They too stand for ideas. Mr Propter, a former lecturer, perhaps comes closest to providing Huxley’s own voice in the novel. He advocates a particular kind of eternity: the timeless good, for time is “the medium in which evil lives to propagates itself, the element in which evil lives and outside of which dies [...] Indeed, it’s more than the element of evil, more than merely its medium. If you carry your analysis far enough, you’ll find that time is evil. One of the aspects of its essential substance.” Propter is critical of the attempt to postpone death seeing the result as: “Another century or so of time and craving. A couple of extra life-times of potential evil.” Good and evil for is measured by whether or not an act propels us toward liberation from time or toward greater enslavement by it.  Serving ideals, whether it be in art that of beauty, or in science, truth, contribute toward the former because it is a step toward the universal, and away from the individual personalities to which we are enslaved. Stepping away from his more mystical points, the question of whether or not immortality, or even longer lives, is even desirable is key. Huxley ‘s prose, whether it be in the speech of character’s, or through narration spins into essays:

“On the plane of the absence of God, men do nothing else except destroy what they have built – destroy what they have built – destroy even while they build – build with the elements of destruction. Madness consists in not recognising the facts; in making wishes the fathers of thoughts; in conceiving things to be other than they really are; in trying to realise desired ends by means which countless previous experiments have shown to be inappropriate.”

After Many a Summer is not Huxley’s best novel. I find his fables more compelling: Brave New World, Ape and Essence and Island. His novels always traverse a difficult line between teaching and story telling. This novel occasionally errs too far on the former. However, the ironic horror of the end is effectively done. So is that to say that Isherwood’s objection to After Many a Summer is persuasive? In many ways, yes. After Many a Summer is frequently thought provoking, but can slip into the dry. There seem to be two poles of reaction to Huxley’s novel, both of which are expressed in Isherwood’s fictional classroom in A Single Man: at one end full of “arid and abstract mysticism” and at the other “a wonderful spiritual sermon.”

Nevertheless, I’ll end this post with a fascinating interview Huxley gave in 1958:

A Single Man, (2009), directed by Tom Ford, tells the story of George Falconer (Colin Firth), an English professor living in the 1960s, Los Angeles; following the sudden death of his partner, Jim (Matthew Goode), George has sunk into depression and has decided to end his life. A Single Man is based on a novel of the same name by Christopher Isherwood, charting the events of George’s life within the course of a single day. The focus of the film is on the fleeting moments, the small things that make life worth living—having made his decision, George goes through the day with a heightened awareness of all the beauty around him.

George: For the first time in my life I can’t see my future. Every day goes by in a haze, but today I have decided will be different. 

Tom Ford is primarily known as an American fashion designer; having propelled the fashion house Gucci into fame, he is the name behind its success. It is no wonder that the cinematography radiates beauty in all aspects, including an elegant score by Abel Korzeniowski alongside the stunning visuals. In adapting the story to screen, Ford made the film his own by adding and replacing some details with events from his own life (for instance, the neighbor girl owning a pet scorpion).

In addition to the wonderfully choreographed visuals, A Single Man displays George’s feelings and thoughts through use of metaphors: his struggle with depression is shown as an underwater sequence, and a surge of pleasure (an exhilarating conversation, or a pretty smile) colors the screen with vibrant tones. As George notices and appreciates details, the camera zooms in and delights in these simple pleasures. Also the pace alters in accordance with his experience of time, where the scene slows down, or flicks between George’s memory and the present. One flashback, in which George discovers an old photograph of Jim, the scene plays out in black and white, like the photograph—almost as if the photograph comes alive.

George: A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.

I saw Heidi Chronicles in New York when I was in my late twenties and, like many women, felt it could have been written just for me.  Like Gina Gionfriddo, I too share Wasserstein’s “certain temperament…that makes you feel gray next to the bouncy people at the your gym.”  That’s part of why, growing up in sunny California, I became convinced that I’d been born on the wrong coast.  Moody, melancholic, and introspective,  I preferred books like Jane Eyre to (god forbid) volleyball on the beach.  After college, I moved back east as soon as I could.

But I digress.  Sort of.  I didn’t start this post to write about identifying with Heidi Holland—an identification that Gionfriddo, in her piece last week, suggests comes more from shared gender as well as the aforementioned shared temperament than from age or era.  Yes, it’d be nice to live in New York so I could rush out to see Gionfriddo’s play on its own merits, and I’ll cross my fingers that Rapture, Blister, Burn comes to the Bay Area (hello, Berkeley Rep?), but what grabbed me in Gionfriddo’s article was how refreshed I felt after reading it.  It got me thinking about plays again.

Years ago–fifth grade, actually–I wrote a few plays.  Later, in junior high and then in high school, I moved onto narrative prose (of the detail-heavy overly descriptive kind) and poetry (of the Plath-inspired, clove-cigarette-saturated variety).  But when I was ten, I wrote plays called A Christmas Play and A Play About Friendship.  Sentimental as the titles sound, both had a dark side.  Friendship, for example, portrayed a betrayal—no doubt influenced by my humiliation when Jenny Waters announced my crush on David Kennedy during a game of hopscotch, a moment that helped form me into the writer (and woman) I became.  I found, if not revenge, then catharsis in gathering a small group of friends at recess, assigning roles, passing around a script, and acting out what I’d written.

Gionfriddo’s piece last Sunday caught my eye as I flipped through the Arts & Leisure section in part because of the photo.  Her baby on her shoulder, what looks like Central Park (that is, trees) in the background, her expression wry and tired and intelligent, she looks refreshingly real–smart, a little tired, with a wry sense of humor.  I liked what she wrote–not just about Heidi and her own play, but the  syntax and music of her sentences, the voice.  I want to hear that voice spoken on stage, read it on the page.

A page or two later, I came across Christopher Isherwood’s article about “some of the finest new playwriting” happening now.  With words like “illuminate,” “lyrical,” “pinpoint accuracy,” “symphonic,” “delicacy,” “inspired and unexpected,” and, yes, “very funny,” Isherwood describes the subtle dramatic power of recent plays by Amy Herzog and Stephen Karam.  I’m working on a novel right now, attempting to calibrate a believable and unexpected narrative arc, so when I read how “Ms Herzog turns [the moment of revelation] on its head” in a scene “so beautifully executed and so unpredictable, that it makes the moment of connection more moving than it might be if it were handled more conventionally,” I lifted my hand and ripped the page down the fold.  Another clip for the files.

Or better yet, for the already cluttered desk, where I’ll see it both pieces more often and be reminded, as a fiction writer and creative-writing instructor, to look to other forms for communion, for emotional authenticity, for a tonic.  I’ll read more plays, see more plays.  And, maybe, one day, write one again.

What genres have you left behind, only to return to?  What other modes have inspired you?  What has made you look anew at elements of storytelling?

Today’s cinema adventure: Chris and Don: A Love Story, a 2007 documentary detailing the 34-year relationship between acclaimed writer Christopher Isherwood and his life partner, artist Don Bachardy.  Practicing documentary filmmaking at its finest, directors Tina Mascara and Guido Santi piece together the remarkable shared life of the couple while also presenting a portrait of each man individually, utilizing footage and narration from surviving partner Bachardy, excerpts from Isherwood’s diaries (read, appropriately enough, by Michael York, who portrayed the author’s alter-ego in the film version of the musical Cabaret, based on Isherwood’s Berlin Stories), interviews with various friends and archivists, and copious home movies and photographs of the couple’s life together. The relationship, which began when the 48-year old British expatriate author met the 18-year old Los Angeles boy on a beach in Santa Monica and defied the odds- and the cynical expectations of the pair’s acquaintances- to endure until Isherwood’s death in 1986, is presented with a restraint and an objective journalistic detachment which preserves the dignity of its subject matter and results in a cumulative emotional wallop, leaving the viewer moved and uplifted by the triumph of an unlikely love. Documentary purists may quibble over the occasional use of re-enactments to depict key moments in the relationship (presented only in brief, out-of-focus snippets without dialogue) and animations derived from Isherwood’s fanciful sketches from his correspondence to his partner, but these touches do nothing to alter or affect the facts presented. Though the film depicts the lives of a gay couple, it is suitable for all audiences; and anyone who watches it is bound to be, as I was, filled with admiration for two people who disregarded social prejudices from every direction and inspired by their success at building a love to last a lifetime.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1138002/

Okay, so this was the year the Oscars got on my nerves for announcing ten Best Picture nominees. (And judging by what was included in those ten, I think we can all agree that I was right to be irked, which is some vindication, at least.)

Ironically enough, 2009 was not a particularly good year for cinema, despite the Academy’s urge to double the number of films contending for Best Picture. My Top 10 is weak, compared to most years — the latter films, while certainly quite good, are filler that wouldn’t have made the cut any other year. And naturally, the Oscars followed their long-standing tradition of ignoring many of the year’s few truly great works. It’s a crime that (500) Days of Summer wasn’t nominated for Best Original Screenplay, and A Single Man was unjustly shut out of so many categories it belonged in — including Best Picture (especially when its competition was sentimental fluff like The Blind Side). A Serious Man, on the other hand, was the most maddening, least enjoyable film I saw all year, and yet because it was a Coen brothers movie, it somehow made its way onto the list.

Whatever. I picked ‘em better. Here are my choices for the top prizes.

THE TOP TEN FILMS OF 2009

10. AVATAR

Yes, Avatar. The cinematic milestone has been massively overhyped, ushering in a 3D craze that is sure to get pretty old pretty fast. The highest-grossing film of all time (however misleading those figures may be, with ticket prices so high) is dazzling to behold and, at times, quite beautiful. In terms of pure popcorn spectacle, James Cameron delivers like no other filmmaker in a story that draws as much from the past (specifically, Western colonization of Africa) as it does from the future.

While the stock characters and predictable, sometime obtuse (Unobtainium? really?) story may hold Avatar back from being a wholly transcendent experience — especially once it’s viewed on smaller 2D screens — it does transport us to a new world both narratively and as a cinematic experience. Avatar is that rare landmark, a film that changes the industry while the world watches – and it more or less lived up to the hype. It’s nice to know that a few directors can still meld eye-popping entertainment with a reasonably intelligent storyline. (Imagine what Michael Bay would have done with the same material.)

9. THE MESSENGER

In its own way as tense and disturbing as The Hurt Locker, The Messenger concerns combat vets faced with the unfortunate gig of notifying survivors of those who have been killed in action. Rather than focus on the grief of the bereaved, however, The Messenger examines the psychological state of soldiers who have returned from “over there” — leaving us rather perturbed that these damaged individuals are the guys “representing” our country. (There’s also a pretty severely messed-up love story at the core.)

The Messenger features standout performances all around, particularly from Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson — they play characters who aren’t necessarily likable, but are vulnerable and human to keep us invested in their story. It’s one of the best examinations of war’s effect on the human psyche in quite some time, certainly a nice companion piece to The Hurt Locker (a sequel, of sorts). This is one case in which we should be glad writer/director Oren Moverman shot The Messenger.

8. BROKEN EMBRACES

Bright cinematography, twisted backstory, fractured timeline, movie-within-the-movie, and Penelope Cruz — Pedro Almodovar is back in fine form with all his tropes, and that’s good news for his ardent fan base. Cruz portrays a secretary-turned-hooker-turned-trophy-wife-turned-actress (only in an Almodovar film would this progression be completely logical — Almodovar never judges characters who sell sex). Naturally, nothing is quite what it seems.

Yes, as is par in Pedro’s course, much of the film plays out as backstory, with characters explaining the backstory at great length; in the present, nothing much “happens.” But in an Almodovar film, the journey is more interesting than most films’ destination; it’s all about characters and atmosphere, and in that department Broken Embraces delivers in spades. While it may not be as indelibly juicy as Almodovar’s Bad Education or Talk To Her is, it’s nevertheless a welcome addition to the Almodovar ouvre. Few American filmmakers take even half the risks Almodovar takes in his safest film.

7. AWAY WE GO

Featuring some of the year’s funniest cameos, Away We Go concerns thirtysomething parents-to-be on the hunt for the perfect place to raise their new family. The contenders? Phoenix, Montreal, and Madison. On the journey, they encounter various incarnations of the all-American family — including boozy loudmouth Allison Janney and the loopy, New Age Maggie Gyllenhaal, before one of the most heartbreaking pole dances you’ll ever see, courtesy of Melanie Lynskey.

John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph have a fresh chemistry as parents who don’t fit any mold; Rudolph, in particular, shows a sensitive side that may surprise SNL followers. Many critics dismissed the film’s leads for being smug, but who hasn’t come across crazy parents like these? Sam Mendes brings a touch of class to a film that might’ve unraveled in the hands of a lesser comedy director, and the small-scale tone is a nice departure from his usual suburban epics.

6. ADVENTURELAND

Marketed as the latest lame rip-off of Superbad, featuring wacky SNL cameos, and starring Bella from Twilight, Adventureland sure didn’t hold much promise as one of the year’s ten best movies. In actuality, though, Greg Mottola’s coming-of-age film is a heartfelt and intelligent teen drama with plenty of laugh-out-loud funny moments (and they’re not stupid). And though the premise is a fitting setup for plenty of zany hijinks, it’s also relatable to virtually everyone – set in that time of life when we have a vague sense of what we want to accomplish with our lives, but are still stuck in a juvenile, dead-end job awaiting opportunity’s knock.

5. FANTASTIC MR. FOX

Wes Anderson’s films have always been highly stylized, like children’s picture books dealing with adult themes. There’s a simplicity to the plots and clear morals at the end of the story. In a word, they’re cartoonish. It’s refreshing, then, to see Anderson make a film that totally embraces the surreality of the worlds his characters inhabit — Fantastic Mr. Fox his first cartoon that’s actually animated.

Spot-on, hilarious voice work from George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, and friends enhances an exceedingly witty screenplay about animals trying to rise above their beastly nature. At times, they’re curiously civilized; at times, not so much. But somehow they come across as more human than the protagonists in some of Anderson’s lesser efforts. The one-of-a-kind stop motion animation is never less than a delight to behold. Perhaps much of the humor will go over the little one’s heads, but that’s because this is a cartoon made primarily for grown-ups. Sorry, kids.

4. THE HURT LOCKER

The Hurt Locker got everyone abuzz because it was directed by a woman, but you’d never know it. The film isn’t any less relentless or more sensitive than the hardest-edged war movies — it’s up there with the likes of Kubrick, Stone, and Coppola’s hard-hitting epics. There’s no tacked-on sentimental coda a la Saving Private Ryan and no Eastwood-esque grandstanding. Kathryn Bigelow wisely eschews making any political statements and instead focuses on three very average soldiers, led by Jeremy Renner as a risk-addicted bomb defuser, with Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty in stirring supporting roles.

Most of the “action” scenes are really “inaction scenes,” as we watch Renner slowly dismantle an explosive or wait for snipers to make their move — putting the audience in the position of a real soldier at war. The tension comes as we hold our breath waiting for what might happen — a massive explosion or a bullet that takes our hero’s life. It could happen any minute. (An effective cameo from Ralph Fiennes drives this point home.) The Hurt Locker isn’t revolutionary as a war film, but it is a satisfying, suspenseful thriller that brings what “our troops” face “over there” into focus. As the best war films are, it’s about the day-to-day, minute-by-minute tension, not the global implications.

3. UP IN THE AIR

Timely recession resonance aside, Up In The Air is most memorable as a throwback to the genre-defying dramedies Hollywood rarely makes anymore, with sophisticated adult characters capable of being funny while experiencing believable human emotions, acting in ways that feel driven by character, not plot. The romance between George Clooney and Vera Farmiga (both fantastic, with chemistry crackling between them) feels organic and alive, without a drop of the typical Hollywood schmaltz (until the third act, at least).

But the real breath of fresh air is Anna Kendrick as Type-A Natalie, never a caricature but always a riot. (Wouldn’t most filmmakers have made Natalie a ho-hum male character and/or turned the film into some bland love triangle?) Kudos to co-writer/director Jason Reitman for stepping just a little outside the box, while still making room for all the stuff in the box we still like. Hilarious and moving in equal measures, Up In The Air didn’t even need to be made during the perfect historical window to be fantastic. But it was.

2. (500) DAYS OF SUMMER

The year’s best villain was not found in Harry Potter, Avatar, or Transformers. She’s right here, as portrayed by Zooey Deschanel. (500) Days Of Summer strikes a near-universal chord because everyone can relate to Tom’s semi-requited love for the unobtainable Summer (and the ensuing hell of heartbreak she puts him through). We can easily see why Tom falls head over heels for her — she’s cute, playful, just a tad enigmatic, and has excellent taste in music. Then, just as easily, we hate her right along with him when her shoulder grows inexplicably cold, stealing the warmth and light from the picture-perfect romance Tom is having in his head. (That name is no accident.) Summer giveth and summer taketh away.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are perfectly cast as the unromantic duo — special kudos to the former, for as played by most other actors of his generation, Tom would have been too wrongheaded and pathetic to sympathize with. (Gordon-Levitt is one to watch for at the Oscars a few years from now.) Smartly, the script (by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber) sheds light on the fact that when the Toms of this world fall for difficult and unavailable Summers, we really only have ourselves to blame (yet we continue to blame her anyway). Marc Webb’s film uses pop songs, foreign films, direct-to-camera confessionals, and other techniques, but that’s just the icing on this cake – for what this film really offers to anyone who’s ever been rejected is catharsis. It’s an original and insightful film that speaks honestly about messy 21st century relationships to hopeless romantics everywhere. It’s a love story for the rest of us.

1. A SINGLE MAN

Who knew Tom Ford had it in him? That the infamous designer’s first film is a visual marvel comes as no surprise to those who know his perfectionism in the fashion world. What is surprising is how well the screenplay (adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s beloved novel) matches the quality of the cinematography, costume design, and art direction. As we move through what is to be the last day in a single man’s life, style and substance meld sublimely — little moments add up to give us the big picture of who this man is and what he’s lost along the way. A Single Man is a “gay movie” in the best sense; it avoids being too provocative, political, or overtly sexual, but there is plenty of nuance, particularly in the pitch-perfect performance from Colin Firth. He somehow gives us every insight into his character’s emotional state while projecting only the utmost stiff-upper-lip restraint. (Witness the scene in which he learns his boyfriend, played by Matthew Goode, has been killed in a car accident. He almost doesn’t react, which says so much.) A difficult task, but Firth rises to the challenge.

A Single Man is a realistic, empathetic portrait of gay man that mercifully avoids camp and cliches. If it failed to fully connect with mainstream audiences, it is certainly destined to join the few quality films that truly speak to the homosexual experience. A Single Man knows that it’s the details that make up a single day, and a single life; we are treated to a series of disconnected conversations between George and a variety of characters, everyone from his perky next-door neighbor (Ginnifer Goodwin) to his hot-for-teacher student (Nicholas Hoult) to a gigolo aping James Dean. Most mesmerizing, of course, is Julianne Moore as George’s perpetually single gal pal Charley, still in love with him after all these years. The intense but lovely score by Abel Korzeniowski seals the deal — A Single Man is heartbreaking, but wonderfully so.

And now, my picks for 2009′s best writing, direction, and performances! (Winners in bold, ranked in descending order from there.)

BEST ACTOR

1. Colin Firth – A Single Man
2. Jeff Bridges – Crazy Heart
3. Joseph Gordon-Levitt – (500) Days Of Summer
4. Viggo Mortensen – The Road
5. Ben Foster – The Messenger

The Academy favorite would have been mine, too, if Colin Firth wasn’t so damn good…

BEST ACTRESS

1. Saoirse Ronan – The Lovely Bones
2. Sandra Bullock – The Blind Side
3. Meryl Streep – Julie & Julia
4. Carey Mulligan – An Education
5. Catalina Saavedra – The Maid

I liked The Lovely Bones more than almost anyone else in the world (though the Heaven sequences were admittedly ill-conceived), but I also think Sandra Bullock elevated the mediocre The Blind Side far above what it would have been otherwise. She’s the only reason I saw it, and by far the best thing about it.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

1. Christoph Waltz – Inglourious Basterds
2. Woody Harrelson – The Messenger
3. Stanley Tucci – The Lovely Bones
4. Nicholas Hoult – A Single Man
5. Matt Damon – Invictus

Again, I’m behind the Oscars on their front-runner, in what is otherwise a fairly weak year in this category.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

1. Anna Kendrick – Up in the Air
2. Julianne Moore – A Serious Man
3. Mo’Nique – Precious
4. Vera Farmiga – Up in the Air
5. Melanie Laurent – Inglourious Basterds

Often my favorite category, it is again this year. It was hard not to pick Moore, but Kendrick is such a scene-stealer. It’s really her year (for me, not the Academy).

BEST DIRECTOR

1. Tom Ford – A Single Man
2. Kathryn Bigelow – The Hurt Locker
3. Jason Reitman – Up In The Air
4. Marc Webb – (500) Days Of Summer
5. James Cameron – Avatar

It’s pretty much a given that my favorite director of the year will fall in line with my favorite film. I greatly admire Bigelow and can’t wait to see her win the Oscar, but Ford really surprised me.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

1. Up In The Air – Sheldon Turner and Jason Reitman
2. A Single Man – Tom Ford and David Scearce
3. Fantastic Mr. Fox – Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach
4. The Lovely Bones – Peter Jackson & Philippa Boyens
5. An Education – Nick Hornby

A Single Man may have been my favorite film, but I credit the script after the direction and performances. Up In The Air, on the other hand, takes quite a few liberties with the source material — Anna Kendrick’s wonderful character, the best thing about the movie, isn’t even in the book. Now that’s an adaptation!

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

1. (500) Days Of Summer – Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber
2. Broken Embraces – Pedro Almodovar
3. The Hurt Locker – Mark Boal
4. The Messenger – Alessandro Camon & Oren Moverman
5. Away We Go – David Eggers & Vendela Vida

No competition here. I loved everything about (500) Days Of Summer‘s script. Everything.

2009 MOVIES – Complete Rankings

1. A Single Man
2. (500) Days of Summer
3. Up in the Air
4. The Hurt Locker
5. Fantastic Mr. Fox
6. Adventureland
7. Away We Go
8. Broken Embraces
9. The Messenger
10. Avatar
11. The Lovely Bones
12. The Girlfriend Experience
13. Inglourious Basterds
14. An Education
15. Up
16. Zombieland
17. Crazy Heart
18. In the Loop
19. The Hangover
20. Where The Wild Things Are
21. Precious
22. Nine
23. State of Play
24. Michael Jackson’s This Is It
25. The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
26. District 9
27. The Road
28. The Maid
29. Two Lovers
30. Public Enemies
31. Coraline
32. I Love You, Man
33. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
34. Whip It
35. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
36. Julie & Julia
37. The Informant!
38. Humpday
39. The Proposal
40. Invictus
41. Moon
42. Monsters vs. Aliens
43. Sunshine Cleaning
44. The Last Station
45. The Blind Sid
46. New York, I Love You
47. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
48. The Box
49. Star Trek
50. He’s Just Not That Into You
51. Jennifer’s Body
52. Duplicity
53. Watchmen
54. Bruno
55. The September Issue
56. The Time Traveler’s Wife
57. Confessions of a Shopaholic
58. Drag Me To Hell
59. Observe & Report
60. Taken
61. Mysteries of Pittsburgh
62. Fast and Furious
63. A Serious Man

*

Next time — 2008!

George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his partner, and determines to persist in the routines of his daily life; the course of A Single Man spans twenty-four hours in an ordinary day. An Englishman and a professor living in suburban Southern California, he is an outsider in every way, and his internal reflections and interactions with others reveal a man who loves being alive despite everyday injustices and loneliness.

I read this for my in-person book group and it meant interrupting another read, something I’m not very good at. This is one of those books which I think really benefits from being able to think about it afterwards and reflect on what the story means.

A Single Man is set within one day of George’s life starting from the moment he wakes up with one of the most memorable opening sequences in a book I have ever read:

Obediently the body levers itself out of bed – wincing from twinges in the arthritic thumbs and the left knee, mildly nauseated by the pylorus in a state of spasm – and shambles naked into the bathroom, where its bladder is emptied and it is weighed; still a bit over 150 pounds, in spite of all that toiling at the gym! Then to the mirror. (p.2)

George is viewed by the narrator as a vessel. A container almost as if he doesn’t really exist. You can’t help but like George and feel sorry for him a bit. The emotional imagery of him being so separated from his self conveyed  such a deep feeling of grief and loss.

There is a sense of incompleteness about the story which I like. You meet George at the end of an era. Jim has died and George is alone and unable to grieve for him properly as a lover. You get hints of their past together but Jim never appears as a character. I like this sense of the fact that there is this whole life that went on before and that we as a reader only get to see this one day. Stories like this fascinate me because of all what is not told, but has happened off the pages. It gives the whole thing a more realistic depth.

I really enjoyed Isherwood’s style of writing and the humour he inserts. The way this book is written is very much a train of consciousness  that rambles from one thought to another. George’s thoughts are all over the place, up and down and side to side – he is confused, he is desperately unhappy and yet there is also hope. Ishe

Although it is a short story, a mere glimpse, the undercurrent within the writing drags you deep into a much larger story, most of which you do not get to see. I truly admire Isherwood’s ability to create a character and within so few pages bring you into his world and make it feel so real you can almost touch it.

I think The Single Man will definitely benefit from a re-read and provided many interesting things to discuss as part of a book group.

Written and Directed by Trevor Miller. The film tells the story of a love triangle between an East London rock-n-roll manager and two of his clients – a girl singer on the verge of mainstream success and the young front-man from a local punk-band, who’s starting to crash and burn. As the star-crossed lovers tear each other apart, a showcase gig in Shoreditch turns bad, igniting anglo-muslim racial tension – now there’s a riot on Redchurch Street than can only end in blood, fire and redemption.

The film has been produced by music manager and promoter maverick Sean McLusky, along with seasoned veteran Hamish McAlpine, who was featured last week in The Hollywood Reporter in Cannes. It stars former singer of ‘Mover’, Sam Hazeldine who starred opposite John Cusack in ‘The Raven’ and French actress Alysson Paradis, younger sister of Vanessa Paradis. Distinct British movie and TV actor Jesse Birdsall also stars in the film, as does Rhys James.

Trevor says “I had returned to London, from Los Angeles, after 17 years and wanted to make a film that would translate to both UK and US audiences. The vibrancy and danger of the East London music scene seemed the perfect subject matter – being both singularly British, yet uniquely exportable. I had been reading Christopher Isherwood’s “Goodbye To Berlin” and found striking parallels between my own experience and the bohemian subculture in which I became immersed. When I witnessed a large street-fight outside the Redchurch Street mosque I realized that this was a story needing to be told. A story about powerful emotion, moral ambiguity – but ultimately hope.”

In 1917, Virginia and Leonard Woolf started The Hogarth Press from their home, armed only with a handpress and a determination to publish the newest, most exciting writing. Hogarth brought the world authors who shaped the culture of the past 100 years: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Vita Sackville-West, to name a few.

This year, what began in London in 1917 finds a new life in New York and Hogarth’s goals are no less lofty: bring readers the authors who will shape the culture of the next 100 years: Anouk Markovits, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, Stephanie Reents, Jay Caspian-Kang, Vincent Lam, Shani Boianjiu, Lawrence Osborne, Ben Masters, and Jenni Fagan.

A rose, is a rose, is a rose. I adore Gertrude Stein, and vintage print presses that pushed the boundaries of what was possible for their authors. I am pathologically drawn to all beautiful books, old and new. Over the last week or so I have had some great conversations with Alexis Washam, Senior Editor at H&C, in New York, and I am hugely impressed by what this new imprint are bringing to the publishing world. I am exceptionally happy to announce that The Panopticon is being published by Hogarth and Crown in the US, Canada, Greenland and all of North America. I am one of those writers with a true travelling hobo soul — so to find this kind of home for The Panopticon — to see it continue its journey out into the world, is totally amazing! I will be looking forward to updating on this one, as and when news comes in. In the meantime I am about to read a bunch of books already being published by Hogarth, can’t wait, I hope they send the canvas bag too. I love to geek out on these things, I played in bands for a long time and it reminds me of great labels like 4AD, or Sub Pop, early Geffen, or Apple. It makes me dance anyway! 

Hogarth is publishing a list of all fiction, all the time: contemporary, voice-driven, character-rich, eclectic, adventurous, provocative, vividly written. “We are honored to create an American life for a great publishing name, and we look forward to building a list of worldly, provocative, and well-written works for a broad and lasting readership,” says Molly Stern, Publisher of Hogarth and Senior Vice President, Publisher, Crown Publishers.

Since then I have (tried) to consume more of Isherwood’s work, starting first with Mr. Norris Changes Trains (or, The Last of Mr. Norris, depending where you’re from), which I found quite hard to get through. Isherwood’s style is quite simple and really quite easy to read but for some reason I had a few issues with that book. The edition I have is doubled up as The Berlin Stories with Goodbye To Berlin.

Goodbye To Berlin was adapted into a play, I Am A Camera (the title of the play being taken from the first page of the book: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”) The play then spawned a less successful film. The book was also adapted into the more famous musical Cabaret, which then, of course, was made into the film starring Liza Minnelli. This post about the film adaptation of another of Isherwood’s novels, A Single Man, sheds some light onto Isherwood’s thoughts about Cabaret.

That a film is not a book is embarrassingly obvious but not entirely
convincing to the purists, who quickly point to Isherwood’s dislike
of Bob Fosse’s Oscar-winning Cabaret, a musical adaptation of his
Berlin Stories. The film is widely considered a classic yet the
writer famously quipped: “I don’t recognise my own child.”

The other of Isherwood’s books that I have read is the much shorter, Prater Violet, which I have talked about on the blog before. I found Prater Violet much easier to get through though felt that Isherwood left it until the last few pages to actually find an emotional point in the book. Prater Violet is about Christopher trying to write a screenplay. For the most part he and his co-writer are left alone to try and actually write the screenplay, but the underlying problems in Germany and Austria often throw up some difficulties for those involved.

I’m going to try and find some more Isherwood to sink my teeth into and I suggest you do too.

Lil

Currently reading: The House of Sleep – Jonathan Coe.