By Frances Allan

Written 13th March 2008

In the last two weeks, 10,000 free copies of R.L Stevenson’s classic, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde have been handed out to people all across Edinburgh, to celebrate Edinburgh as the UNESCO World City of Literature.

This is  part of the One Book – One Edinburgh campaign and in conjunction with World Book Day.

But what does all this mean for the City of Edinburgh? World Book Day on 6^th March saw thousands of school children being given book tokens to encourage reading for both pleasure and learning and has been celebrated in over 100 countries worldwide.

The title of City of Literature is well deserved for Edinburgh, with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), handing out this title for the first time to a city which, like the Jekyll and Hyde story, is a city of many characters.

credit: cityofliterature.com

Edinburgh has long been a city which has been a cultural capital for its architecture and history, but its literary scene is less well-known, yet dates backs for many years.

Dr Linda Dryden is heavily involved with the One Book – One Edinburgh campaign and an expert on gothic literature. She said: “This means that Edinburgh is being recognised at an international level, although there’s not as much money behind it as being pronounced City of Culture”

She continued: “It recognises Scottish literature in general, not just previous literature but up and coming writers too.”

The title was awarded to Edinburgh in 2006 and since then a host of campaigns and activities have been happening across the city, last year for the One Book – One Edinburgh campaign R.L.Stevenson’s book Kidnapped was used, to great success.

So what has Edinburgh got as a literary city? Well writers have been living here for hundreds of years, Sit Walter Scott’s Waverley novels were based in and around Edinburgh. The city also has many independent and national publishers based here, and many Literary Pub Tours run around the city, which are extremely successful.

The city is also home to many other famous writers, some of today’s best selling authors live in or have come from Edinburgh, Ian Rankin, Irvine Welsh, Alexander McCall-Smith and J.K.Rowling, who has adopted Edinburgh as her home and has inspired millions of children and adults to take on thick books with complex story lines, and famously finished the last book in the Harry Potter series in Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel.

Dr Dryden said: “Edinburgh has been a centre for publishing and literary activity for centuries, and it was felt we weren’t capitalising on that heritage. We had these big international authors living here and yet nothing was being done to celebrate that rich culture.”

The One Book – One Edinburgh campaign has seen many events across the city, poetry readings, plays of Jekyll and Hyde, Hyde & Seek, R.L.Stevenson Literary tours, discussions about the book and of course, the 10,000 free copies which were given out all across the city. Special graphic novels have also been written and drawn by Alan Grant and Cam Kennedy, which have also been printed in large print and Gaelic.

The city of Edinburgh, credit: Alex Morrice

The City of Literature title has brought many people to the city and is bringing the attention of the worlds literary types to Edinburgh.

Dr Dryden said: “What Edinburgh has done with being the first bid, is show the way, we are the pioneers and it has opened the doors to other cities that have a literary culture.”

Other cities, such as Calcutta, are now bidding to get their own World City of Literature title after seeing how successful Edinburgh has been in winning its title and what it has done for the city. When more cities are given the title, they will be encouraged to take part in book-exchanges and other cross cultural literary initiatives.

Will the One Book – One Edinburgh campaigns actually encourage more people to read? It is debatable, when most of the free copies of Jekyll and Hyde are being given out in libraries, bookshops, and to reading groups, to people who are already reading, although maybe they would not have picked up Jekyll and Hyde.

Anna Burkey, from the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust said: “Much of our feedback suggests that people who have never read Stevenson, or rarely read, have enjoyed our campaign,”

Currently, there are 800,000 adults in Scotland with low levels of literacy, with 300,000 of these unemployed and 30% of Scottish adults believe their literacy and numeric skills to be inadequate.

“It is an extremely high accolade for Edinburgh to have received such a prestigious designation, given in recognition of all the literary activity that goes on throughout the city – at local and international levels,” Ms Burkey said.

She continued: “There is strong and growing interest from many other cities in the world to move to try and obtain this title themselves”

(Previously on The War Bride: female narrator gets out of a country she hates, only to discover she can’t function in a normal environment; opts for a strategic retreat, starts wondering if that’s all there is.)

I’ve seen the Ibiza thing happen in other people’s lives.

Heather, the lead in Irvine Welsh’s “The Undefeated”, chooses the very same spot for her first break from an unhappy home life, but she can barely leave her hotel room: while her friend Marie seems pretty happy “swanning around the bars in San Antonio”, Heather spends a horrifying week as a shut-in, alternatively berating herself for the failure of her marriage and bawling her eyes out. She flies home earlier, determined to ride it out, but she knows a vacation was not the wisest choice as far as The Rest Of Her Life is concerned.

I pored over Welsh’s novels in my early twenties, hoping to feel, uh, chemically in tune with someone who employed the same recreational tools I did. In the end, what really stuck was the loneliness of a single woman. Fancy that.

I started thinking about it as I headed home again. It’s an old question.

Do feel lonely, or are you alone?

I’m not truly alone – I failed in securing a mate, but I was blessed in the friends department. (Granted, most of them didn’t know me when all I hoped was to spontaneously combust, but some people who had known me for 10+ years still took me back – turns out they did want me to get help, but were afraid they’d fare much worse with an intervention. Can’t blame them on this one.)

So, I guess I’m lonely.

I know. A single woman in her thirties must be stored in one of two separate containers. There’s Box A, for those unattached and loving every minute of it, thus capable of having sex with the reckless abandon of fictional males; and there’s Box B, for those who are pretty much ready to surrender themselves to an eternity of old-maidenhood.

I’m 32, and I’m looking for Box C. But that’s not the issue here.

There’s Us Girls, with the artfully displayed banter, the tee-hee and the flirtation trigger. There’s usgirls, eyes on the nonexistent prize, desperate for a glimpse at coupledom, and oh, the lenghts we’ll go to be spared but one word.

There’s a lot of us.

You know it.

You love it.

You thrive on our lack of marriageability.

We’re the living, breathing example of When Holding Out For A Hero Goes Wrong. There is comfort to be had in the spectacle of us, keeping ourselves busy with things such as late night cable fare, 12-step self-improvement programs, questionable life choices – and unabashedly poor judgement whenever male society enters the fold.

No hard feelings. I’d probably do the same if I were you.

Call it poor-Heatherness.

I just read “Hey Nostradamus!”, and one thing hit me from the start.

When I used to read Douglas Coupland as a girl, I couldn’t really wrap my head around the amount of pain his signature characters suffered because of them being alone. It all seemed a bit much. Like the author was using “loneliness” as a plain character trait, or maybe it was his notion of style that made him choose that literary path.

I’m afraid I judged those characters. Bad idea.

Because, you see, now I know that feeling. I own that feeling. You’re thirty, you get up in the morning, you take one look at the bathroom mirror and you go, Lord, I have another forty-odd years of this ahead of me. What am I going to do.

But.

As much as it pains me to admit it, that very same loneliness I despise is what kept me alive – scratch the past tense. It still does.

It gave me room to breathe when I needed it bad. It allowed me to pursue a career when I wasn’t happy with a job. Best of all, it stayed with me as I started writing for a living. It narrowed my focus to a chapter, a paragraph, right down to a single word.

Loneliness doesn’t have a gender. It’s just an it.

And it does have a downside, because being like this just hurts. But if I had to choose between securing a companion while carrying around such a sense of displacement, and staying alone in the here and now, I wouldn’t bat an eye.

I’ve been a fool to think I ever could.

Here I wrote something about my body being both the target and the way out for any undesirable emotion. I tend to follow similar cues when entertainment is concerned. If I want to read, watch, or listen to something, I shall. It’s not a solace thing as much as a food-and-shelter kind of thing. Sometimes you know what you need, and that is that.

Last week I was driven to watch a four hour BBC miniseries based on “Emma”.

Brutal, I know. But you do what you gotta do.

And I’m no Austenite in need of a quick fix, but something about Emma always hit the spot. (So much more than “Pride and Prejudice”, cause if that were the case, I’d have been all up in a Bollywoodish adaptation, and I can vouch on that not happening). So, I just went with it.

As it turned out, “Emma” served a double purpose: it kept me vaguely entertained, and it smacked the back of my head like an exceptionally well-spoken two-by-four.

When Harriet balks at her refusing to even consider marriage, Emma offers a reasonable explanation for such an outlook on “romance”: she’s independently wealthy, so she doesn’t have to put herself on the market; she’s occupied, what with running her own house, tending to her own needs and so on; best of all, she’s never going to end up “an old maid” like their neighbour Miss Bates, for she will always be able to rely on her personal fortune and position to avoid the ugly label.

My twelve year old self was dead on in feeling cheated by Disney’s take on “The Little Mermaid”. Losing a beautiful singing voice for a twat. Bitch had it coming.

Of course – we all know how it ends: Emma marries because she falls in love, not out of family obligations or a misplaced sense of propriety. She gets the guy and the life. But first and foremost, she stops making plans, and learns to see what’s what.

I thought I had it all in my head. I let myself get so carried away with the notion of leaving, I forgot to look around.

It had always been there, really.

Mr. O'brien

I’m in the mood for ambitious fiction. Earlier this year I was blessed with a run of incredible reads,  topped off by Yvegeny Zamiatin’s masterpiece, We.

Mr. Zamiatin

Since then I’ve taken on more projects that inevitably have eaten into my reading time, and I am becoming more zealous in my quest for inspired reads. Ambition is the only flavor my literary palate wants to taste right now. I’m hungry for books that make me break out the booksdarts and re-read for pure pleasure. I want prose and plots that cause reactions, page turners that remind me how lucky I am to know how to read.

I’m compiling a list (in no particular order) of ambitiously written books and additions are requested in the comments section! I’d love suggestions for a 2010 reading list…

Mr. Baldwin

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

The Inferno by Dante

Morvagine by Blaise Cendrars

Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller

Candide by Voltaire

The Electric Koolaid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Black Boy by Richard Wright

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? by Edward Albee

Bowl of Cherries by Milliard Kauffman

The Whapshot Chronicle by John Cheever (as well as many of his shorter works)

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

The Iliad by Homer

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Her by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

The Twits by Roald Dahl

Lolita by Vladamir Nabakov

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Monkeywrench Gang by Edward Abbey

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

Peanuts by Charles Schultz

Mr. Abbey

more:

Bluebeard/Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

The Aeneid by Virgil

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Matilda by Roald Dahl

Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger

His Dark Materials Series by Phillip Pullman

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’brien

White Noise by Don Delillo

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

The Watchmen by Alan Moore

More..?

S-a deschis ( pana duminica, 22 noiembrie inclusiv ) targul de carte de toamna Kilipirim 2009. Nush care e titulatura exacta, don’t really care anyway. M-am dus in vreo doua zile pe-acolo ( nu mi-au ajuns banii pentru un singur raid printre tarabe ) si am fost orientat spre zona macho a literaturii in tot ce am cumparat.

Ca de exemplu Hemingway ( “Batranul si marea”, editia cartonata de la Polirom ), cu barbatii lui stoici, seducatori, macho, laconici si impenetrabili, dar undeva in spatele evenimentelor care ii conduc. Ca de exemplu Irvine Welsh ( “Porno” ), scotianul in cartile caruia eroii sunt niste anti-eroi, niste drogati, si/sau niste ratati, intotdeauna membri ai clasei de jos, huligani, etc. Ca de exemplu Sam Savage ( “Firmin” ). Ok, poate asta nu, dar oricum, e vorba despre un sobolan care-si doreste sa fie barbat, so why not?

Si mai ales ca de exemplu Charles Bukowski ( “Femei” ), in al carui roman semi-auto-biografic personajul central e un alcoolic afemeiat, un fel de satír literat ( de altfel si seamana fizic ), pe langa care Henry Miller pare o domnisoara din pension.

Un soi de bonus, la final:

El servicio antidrogas ruso armó una lista de 37 libros no aconsejados para leer. Algunos de los autores son Tom Wolfe y el español Arturo Pérez Reverte. Según el Servicio Federal de Lucha Antidrogas estos libros contienen “elementos de propaganda de narcóticos y sustancias psicoactivas”.

A ver: La Reina del Sur, de Pérez Reverte es uno de los NO recomendados. Puta, ya lo leí. Trainspotting y La casa del ácido del escocés Irvine Welsh también. Soy fanática de esas películas  (y shh, las tengo en casa, originales). Ya seré drogadicta?

¿Qué habría sido de la Literatura sin los excesos de Bukowski, Oscar Wilde o Baudelaire, del arte sin la locura de Van Gogh, de Toulouse- Lautrec, de la música sin los viajes de Los Beatles, de la Psicología sin el opio y así y así…

This book, by Irvine Welsh, surprised me by how much I got into it.  I have read one other of his books, Trainspotting, and while I enjoyed it, I had trouble following the “plot” and my interest was in and out as I read it.  I remember liking it when I was finished, but not so much while I read it, if that makes any sense.

Marabou is different.  The form of the novel is different from most, as is his style, but it isn’t that hard to follow.  Basically, Roy Strang is in a coma.  While he is in a coma, he, as narrator, goes in and out of a few story lines that make up the book.

One part of the novel is his life up to the current time, describing his childhood in Scotland/South Africa, his life as a Hebs football club hooligan (mostly consisting of fighting anyone and anything in their way), and his downfall as a relatively good person.

The next story line is a coma induced, childhood terror inspired, story of the hunt for the Marabou Stork with another man in jungle of South Africa. Complete with cock sizing tales of clashes with sharks and lions, distrust and rape of locals, and  a touch of homo eroticism.

It all culminates into an intertwining of the stories as he can hear the people around him in the hospital infirmary while he is in the coma.  He can hear his past mistakes coming back to haunt him in the form of recurring characters as he tries to force his mind back into the fictitious plot in order to avoid his awful reality.  This all ends with what can only be described in terms of the most god awful thing that can ever happen.

I really enjoyed this book a lot.  His style of writing can take a toll if you’re not used to something like accented english spelled phonetically like a Scotsman would talk, but I found that I quickly adjusted, eventually to a point where I found the foreign style to be intriguing in its originality.  Most of the time, it’s very easy to hear the voices of the characters speaking in my head like a movie, and the back and forth movement between the plots kept me at attention waiting to find out what happens next.

Reheated Cabbage by Irving Welsh

Writers are often encouraged to publish everything even remotely publishable, and often end up publishing a volume of miscellaneous writings that did not fit anywhere else. This sometimes represents the worst a writer has to offer, but this is not the case with Reheated Cabbage. Irvine Welsh lets us know with the title that he knows we know this is a miscellany, that he’s offering leftovers, but these eight stories just make me wish Welsh had more books I haven’t read.

But Welsh is always enjoyable, sometimes maudlin, and his mastery of of the Scottish vernacular is so strong that I always pick up a bit of a Scottish accent for a little while. He writes it like it sounds. Consider:

“You shut yir fuckin mooth, lover boy!…Ah’ll knock yir fuckin teeth oot then yi’ll huv tae go tae the fuckin dentist, awright!”

“Ye fuckin try, but ye ken deep down thit yir nivir gaunny see eye tae eye, n that’s that.”

Grade: B-

ஒரிஜினல் லிஸ்ட் இங்கே. பாஸ்டன் பாலாவுக்கு நன்றி!

சைரனோ டி பெர்கராக், Cyrano de Bergerac – எட்மண்ட் ரோஸ்டாண்ட் எழுதிய புத்தகம். வெகு நாட்களுக்கு முன் படித்த நாடகம், கதை மட்டுமே மங்கலாக நினைவிருக்கிறது. ஹோசே ஃபெர்ரர் நடித்து ஒரு முறை, ஜெரார்ட் டிபார்டியூ நடித்து ஒரு முறை வந்திருக்கிறது. இரண்டையும் கமல் குறிப்பிடுகிறார், இரண்டையும் நான் பார்த்ததில்லை.

ஸ்பார்டகஸ், Spartacus – ஹோவர்ட் ஃபாஸ்ட் எழுதிய நாவல். ஸ்டான்லி குப்ரிக் இயக்கி கிர்க் டக்ளஸ் நடித்த புகழ் பெற்ற படம். என் கண்ணில் சுமாரான படம்தான். நாவல் படித்ததில்லை.

எ க்ளாக்வொர்க் ஆரஞ்ச், A Clockwork Orange – அந்தோனி பர்ஜஸ் எழுதிய நாவல். படித்ததில்லை. ஸ்டான்லி குப்ரிக் இயக்கி மால்கம் மக்டொவல் நடித்தது. பிரமாதமான படம். குப்ரிக் கலக்கிவிட்டார்.

லாஸ்ட் டெம்ப்டேஷன் ஆஃப் க்ரைஸ்ட், Last Temptation of Christ – நிகோலாய் கசான்ட்சாகிஸ் எழுதிய நாவல். மார்டின் ஸ்கொர்ஸஸி இயக்கி இருக்கிறார். பார்த்ததுமில்லை, படித்ததுமில்லை.

பீயிங் தேர், Being There – ஜெர்சி கொசின்ஸ்கி எழுதிய நாவல். ஹால் ஆஷ்பி இயக்கி பீட்டர் செல்லர்ஸ் நடித்தது. படித்ததில்லை, ஆனால் படம் பார்த்திருக்கிறேன். சுமாரான படம்.

ட்ரெய்ன்ஸ்பாட்டிங், Trainspotting – இர்வின் வெல்ஷ் எழுதிய நாவல். ஸ்லம்டாக் மில்லியனர் புகழ் டான்னி பாயில் இயக்கியது. பார்த்ததுமில்லை, படித்ததுமில்லை, கேள்விப்பட்டதும் இல்லை.

பர்ஃப்யூம், Perfume – யாரோ பாட்ரிக் சுஸ்கிண்ட் எழுதியதாம். டாம் டைக்வர் இயக்கியதாம். பார்த்ததுமில்லை, படித்ததுமில்லை, கேள்விப்பட்டதும் இல்லை.

சிட்டி சிட்டி பாங் பாங், Chitti Chitti Bang Bang – ஜேம்ஸ் பாண்ட் புகழ் இயன் ஃப்ளெமிங் எழுதிய சிறுவர்களுக்கான புத்தகம். டிக் வான் டைக் நடித்தது. படம் சிறுவர் சிறுமிகளுக்கு பிடிக்கும். நாவல் படித்ததில்லை.

க்யூரியஸ் கேஸ் ஆஃப் பெஞ்சமின் பட்டன், Curious Case of Benjamin Button – ஸ்காட் ஃபிட்ஸ்ஜெரால்ட் எழுதிய சிறுகதை. ப்ராட் பிட் நடித்து டேவிட் ஃபிஞ்சர் இயக்கியது. இந்த வருஷ ஆஸ்கார் போட்டியில் ஸ்லம்டாக் மில்லியனருக்கு பெரும் போட்டியாக இருந்தது. படித்ததில்லை, இன்னும் பார்க்கவும் இல்லை.

ஃபாரஸ்ட் கம்ப், Forrest Gump – வின்ஸ்டன் க்ரூம் எழுதியது. டாம் ஹாங்க்ஸ் நடித்து ராபர்ட் ஜெமகிஸ் இயக்கியது. சராசரிக்கு மேலான படம். பல ஆஸ்கார் விருதுகளை வென்றது. ஆனால் அந்த சமயத்தில் வந்த பல்ப் ஃபிக்ஷன், ஷாஷான்க் ரிடம்ப்ஷன் ஆகியவை இதை விட சிறந்த படங்கள். புத்தகம் படித்ததில்லை.

மாரத்தான் மான், Marathon Man- வில்லியம் கோல்ட்மான் எழுதிய நாவல். டஸ்டின் ஹாஃப்மன், லாரன்ஸ் ஒலிவியர் நடித்து ஜான் ஷ்லேசிங்கர் இயக்கியது. பார்த்ததுமில்லை, படித்ததுமில்லை.

மாஜிக், Magic – இதுவும் வில்லியம் கோல்ட்மான் எழுதிய நாவல். அந்தோனி ஹாப்கின்ஸ் நடித்து ரிச்சர்ட் அட்டன்பரோ இயக்கியது. பார்த்ததுமில்லை, படித்ததுமில்லை, கேள்விப்பட்டதும் இல்லை.

டிராகுலா, Dracula – ப்ராம் ஸ்டோகர் எழுதிய நாவல். கமல் ஃப்ரான்சிஸ் ஃபோர்ட் கொப்போலா இயக்கிய படத்தை சொல்கிறார். நான் பார்த்திருப்பது பழைய பேலா லுகோசி நடித்த படம்தான். லுகொசி ஒரு eerie உணர்வை நன்றாக கொண்டு வருவார். நாவல் சுமார்தான், ஆனால் ஒரு genre-இன் பிரதிநிதி.

காட்ஃபாதர், Godfather – மரியோ பூசோ எழுதியது. அல் பசினோ, மார்லன் பிராண்டோ நடித்து ஃப்ரான்சிஸ் ஃபோர்ட் கொப்போலா இயக்கிய மிக அருமையான படம். நல்ல நாவலும் கூட.

கமல் கொஞ்சம் esoteric படங்களை விரும்புவார் போல தெரிகிறது. எனக்கு மிகவும் பிடித்த, மிக அற்புதமான நாவலும், அருமையான படமும் ஆன To Kill a Mockingbird-ஐ விட்டுவிட்டாரே!

கமலின் லிஸ்டில் காட்ஃபாதர் மட்டுமே நல்ல புத்தகம், மற்றும் நல்ல படம் – என்னைப் பொறுத்த வரையில். நான் படித்திருக்கும் புத்தகமும் அது ஒன்றுதான். கமல் சொல்லி இருக்கும் படங்களில் நான் பாதிக்கு மேல் பார்த்ததில்லை. பார்த்த வரையில் காட்ஃபாதர் மற்றும் எ க்ளாக்வொர்க் ஆரஞ்ச் மட்டுமே பார்க்க வேண்டிய படம். ஆனால் அவர் சொல்லி இருக்கும் படங்களில் பல பிரபலமான படங்கள் – ஸ்பார்டகஸ், ஃபாரஸ்ட் கம்ப், பெஞ்சமின் பட்டன், சிட்டி சிட்டி பாங் பாங் – இருக்கின்றன. பார்த்திருப்பீர்கள். படித்திருப்பீர்கள். நீங்கள் கமலின் தேர்வுகளைப் பற்றி என்ன நினைக்கிறீர்கள்?

தொடர்புடைய பதிவுகள்
கமல் சிபாரிசுகள் – சிறந்த திரைக்கதைகள் உள்ள தமிழ் படங்கள்

Después de haber leído la novela de Irvinine Welsh ,”Secretos de alcoba de los grandes chefs” quedé como diría un traductor español incompetente , flipado , con el lugar ; no con la historia porque andar cuenteando con una especie de maldición onda Dorian Grey de Oscar Wilde ,en los primeros años del siglo XXI es una majadería , para mi porque , al parecer las historias de vampiros hoy la llevan ( de hecho si yo no supiera que el lugar de Drácula está en transilvania , Rumania , igual podría pensar que era originario de Escocia) ; pero al margen de ese punto que ocupa como trescientas de las quinientas páginas de la novela , la verdad es que hay que reconocer que está bien escrita , es entretenida ; hay por ejemplo un polvo casi postrero entre el protagonista y una compañera de trabajo , que me hizo reir a carcajadas y , en general es un libro bastante fácil de leer y moderadamente interesante ; pero lo que me interesó a mi fue la onda escocesa , no sé , ese país marginal , colonizado por los putos ingleses , con una superficie y una población suficientes como para tener su propio estado , con una cultura y una tradición en la misma onda y con un frío letal , muy al norte está ubicada esa tierra insular, casi dándose de morros con el polo norte , poca luz en invierno , otoño y primavera , pobreza , alcoholismo , drogas , violencia , hooligans y cagados de susto ante su propia libertad ; algo absurdo pensando en que , seguramente , las plataformas petrolíferas conque Inglaterra se forra hoy están ante las costas escocesas y ellos deberían recoger todos los beneficios ; de eso ellos saben porque la fama de cagados que tienen es universal ; en fin , en las últimas elecciones ganó en Glasgow o en Edimburgo el partido nacionalista escocés , es de esperar que en las próximas gane también en Aberdeen y en las zonas rurales; o sea cuando estos giles se liberen de los ingleses habrá que beberse un buen scotch con soda y celebrar …

Out of Place, Out of Time

Victory Gardens presents:

Kill the Old, Torture Their Young

by David Harrower
directed by Kathryn Walsh
thru November 7th (buy tickets)

reviewed by Paige Listerud

The success of Blackbird at Victory Gardens Theatre this summer has exposed Chicago to the work of Edinburgh born playwright David Harrower. Kill the Old, Torture Their Young, onstage at Steep Theatre, is Harrower’s second play, which had its world premiere at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 1998, fresh from his breakout success with Knives in Hens (1995).

“Kill the Old, Torture Their Young” is also the name of a song by Biffy Clyro, a Scottish alternative grunge band, which also had its beginnings in the mid-90s under the name Screwfish. Interestingly enough, Harrower bookends his play with monologues from a nameless Rock Singer (Derek Garner), commenting on modern alienation from an airplane in flight. But any connection between the two may have more to do with the 90’s explosion of Scottish culture than anything else. It’s not that the playwright might be familiar with Biffy Clyro; it’s that the band’s lyrics, too, are chockfull of the alienation and dislocation that inform Harrower’s central themes.

Steep Theatre’s production dislocates Kill the Old, Torture Their Young even further, from its cultural and historical roots. Placing the action in America, the actors do not engage in Scottish dialect; nor is there much of a strong nod to the 1990s postmodern use of multiple narratives–experimentation that ultimately influenced major commercial films like Magnolia. Director Katherine Walsh’s choices would be more than excusable with a stronger cast, with better timing to pull off all the nuanced humor of Harrower’s writing. However, given the unevenness of performances and lack of a cohesive ensemble, this production loses its bearings in more ways than one.

What also goes missing is daring punk/grunge energy that would better inform the rage of a character like Darren (Niall McGinty), a man whose thwarted ambition to become an actor results in otherwise inexplicable violence. Much like the Scottish novel Trainspotting, written by Irvine Welsh, made into a major motion picture, Kill the Old, Torture Their Young contains an underlying current of rebellion against alienating daily capitalist existence. That rage, unfortunately, goes largely unexploited and un-acted on in this production. Sadly, characters in this production seem to share only common resignation to the dreary, meaninglessness rhythm of their commodified lives.

That being said, a few performances create interest. Jim Poole’s quiet and stirring portrayal of Steven stands out, as the manager who could film the city he loves better than Robert (Peter Moore), the famous documentarian hired to do the job. Nice moments are created between Robert and Heather (Julia Siple) in a hotel room together. Paul (Leonard Kraft) and Angela (Bronwen Prosser) make a realistic pair of lost souls, who will likely stay together even if one doesn’t know what to do about the other. James Allen’s chagrined Birdwatcher and Patricia Donegan’s random Woman in Robes add badly needed humor and spice to the proceedings.

Rating: ««

Production Personnel

By Rory Reynolds

TOP Scots author Irvine Welsh has revealed that his dream of being able to buy a home for his mum came true after the success of Trainspotting.

The 51-year-old offered his beloved mum Jean a house anywhere she wanted, to be paid for by the multi-million pound fortune that came after the success of his gritty Scots novels.

But his mum, a former waitress, insisted on staying in the home where she and her late husband Peter lived in Edinburgh.

So the best-selling author forked out £19,000 to purchase the modest house from Edinburgh City Council for his hard-working mum.

His mum and dad had moved there after bringing Irvine up in Muirhouse, West Pilton and, most famously, Leith – the setting for most of his novels.

Welsh rose to fame after penning the cult classic Trainspotting in 1993, which was adapted for the silver screen in 1996.

The hit British movie also launched the careers of fellow Scots Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Kevin McKidd and Kelly Macdonald – all of whom have achieved massive success in the wake of the production.

Welsh has since splashed out on luxury homes in Edinburgh’s New Town, Chicago and Miami, along with a townhouse in Dublin’s trendy Rathmines area, where he lives with his wife Elizabeth.

He said: “Everybody was better off than my parents were.

“They both had poorly paid jobs and lived in council houses all their lives.

“It’s great to be able to make sure that at least my mum is OK now, in that respect.”

And in an interview last month, Robert Carlyle revealed that Trainspotting director Danny Boyle is “edging closer” to making Porno, Welsh’s sequel to the hit novel and movie.

See more of our pictures at our Flickr site and videos at our dedicated channel,  Deadline TV.

SOUNDTRACK: ERIC CHENAUX-Sloppy Ground (2008).

It took several listens before I fully enjoyed this disc.  There’s something about Chenaux’s voice that is very calming, almost soporific.  And, since his general songwriting style is kind of ambient and almost formless–with no real choruses or even rhythms, the disc tends to get lost in the ether.  There’s also some unusual instrumentation (electric harp & guitarjo (!)) too, which continues the otherworldly feel of the disc.

What really hooked me into the disc though was the three “funk marches” that distinguish themselves from the rest of the disc.  “Have I Lost My Eyes” comes in like a raging gust of fresh air after the first three drifting tracks.  It’s got a strong melody and raw drums that propel this fantastic track.  “Boon Harp” & “Old Peculiar” have a similar strong vibe.  And they are really the anchors of this disc.

The rest of the album isn’t bad, I just find it hard to listen to in one lengthy sitting.  The opening three songs tend to drift a round a little too much.  But one at a time, these songs are pretty cool.

[READ: Last Week of September 2009] The Fifth Column & The Flexicon

These two pieces were part of the list of uncollected David Foster Wallace publications.  The difference with thee two pieces is that he plays a small role along with several other authors.  Both of these pieces are sort of a exquisite corpse idea. Although unlike a true exquisite corpse, (in which the author sees only a little of the end of the previous author’s work) it’s pretty clear that the authors had access to the entire work.  The quotes in bold are from The Howling Fantods.

For a delightful exquisite corpse piece that I authored see the untitled comic strip on my website.  About ten years ago I started an exquisite corpse comic strip and sent it to a number of people who all had a lot of fun continuing the story.  I have finally put it online at paulswalls.com/comic.  (See, artists, I told you I’d do something with the cartoons some day!)

[READ: September 29, 2009] The Fifth Column

“The Fifth Column–A Novel: Week Eleven”. The Village Voice Vol. 41, No. 7; Feb 13, 1996; p. 50. [NOTES: This is from an exquisite corpse (a story written by several authors in which each author will start from where the previous had left off and then pass it on to the next) by Jonathan Frazen, Rick Moody, A.M. Homes, DFW and others. It was published over fifteen weeks (a different author each week) in The Village Voice. DFW did week eleven. The complete "novel" was compiled in the March 26, 1996 issue of The Village Voice in abridged form. All fifteen original parts are available here.]

There are no details of how this “novel” or if there were any guidelines at all.
The “story” is a pretty standard sexy/secret agent piece.  Some of the authors try to remove it from its trajectory, but Una, the former Miss Ohio and lover of explosives, keeps resurfacing.  It’s not easy to review this because it is more or less a nonsense piece, with authors trying to (I assume) set up the next author with either an impossible or humorous cliffhanger, but the caliber of writers is pretty high so I’ll summarize a little.

Oh, and the PDF link is really poor quality.  It’s a little blurry and there are lines that are not legible at all.  However, it is the only place online where this work can be found, so, I recommend reading it on the screen at 200% magnification.

JONATHAN FRANZEN-Week One
Franzen sets up the story with a lengthy introduction that serves as the basis for the entire piece.  In it, Una, a barmaid and former Miss Ohio is setting off to a Spy Convention.

RICK MOODY-Week Two
Moody gives us some back story on Una, or more specifically her hometown of Toledo, OH, which is now a ghost town.  We also learn that she has 10 siblings. Moody also introduces the phrase “Let the Sparks Shower.”

A.M. HOMES-Week Three
Homes names the siblings (all variants of their parents’ names (and quite humorous too)).  And then she gets to the heart of the matter: Una has been mailing body parts in padded envelopes.  And in a bit more back story, Homes lists the successive pageants that Una won, leading to her being crowned Miss Ohio.  In this final pageant, it was the talent show, where she dis- and re- assembled an AK47 that secured her victory.  Homes also concludes with the sparks showering.

RANDALL KENAN-Week Four
Kenan introduces a new, lasting character: Michah, a dreadlocked, near-mythical figure in Una’s life.  He thinks Una is crazy.  And maybe she is.

JIM LEWIS-Week Five
Lewis is the first author to mess with the format of the story.  He switches the focus from Una to the publisher of a University Press publishing house.  He rejects the Una story and regrets that his publishing house has gone commercial.  The story then shifts focus to follow the publisher and his three ex wives.

SUSAN DAITCH-Week Six
Daitch picks up on Lewis’ story by including the publishers’ first wife, Elena, in the narrative.  She moves the setting from Ohio to Brooklyn where Elena is taken in for questions regarding a body found floating in a pool.  She is a suspect because her ex-husband told the police that she was sending him body parts in the mail.  (Nice tie in!)

MATTHEW STADLER-Week Seven
Enter Sergeant Dex who questions Elena and asks to feel her pregnant belly.  Dex also informs us that Michah is a fictional character that Elena made up to throw everyone off the trail.  And, he pleads, get us back to the story of Una, beautiful Una.

CLAIRE MESSUD-Week Eight
Messud breaks the fourth wall all the way down.  She has Elena confess.  First “because the plot demanded it”  and second because she was guilty.  Elena also confesses that her goal has always been to undermine Una because she, Elena, was supposed to win the Miss Ohio pageant that Una swiped from under her feet.

DALE PECK-Week Nine
Peck moves the story ahead six months.  Una bursts into a cell, grenades ablaze and rescues Elena.  And Una reveals that Elena’s ex husband is The Blind Man for ASAP (the Association for a Swift Apocalypse and Pestilence introduced by Rick Moody),  Una also reveals that all of the disparate threads (even the fiction that Elena wrote) that have been floating around in this story were actually part of a larger narrative.  Everything has its place.

IVA PEKARKOVA-Week Ten
Pekarkova introduces the thought-to-be-dead-but-very-much-alive Comrade Brezhnev and informs us that he is hiding out under the code name Postmaster General.  He reveals that Una is actually an American man in drag.  And Brezhnev demands action.  He wants to turn the Pentagon into a Square: “This time next week..a shower of sparks would surely fly.”

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE-Week Eleven
DFW simultaneously connects the stories and breaks them apart with his eleven numbered paragraphs.  Each details a scene.  The first is set 36 hours after Peck’s Six Months Later notice.  The third twists the “sparks” into a box of sporks.  Number 4 is a cryptogram from “Shower of sparks” to “C. Howe Sparkshauser.”  It was Corliss Howe Sparkshauser that tried to convince The Postmaster that Una was a drag queen.

Oh, and Sparkshauser has terrible ear troubles while flying.  The pain can only be relieved by yawning, so he has taught himself to yawn at will.  Despite the proliferation of extraneous details, DFW narrows down the story with one paragraph: Michah is writing a computer program for Una and Sparkshauser.  It is designed to convince Elena to help them neutralize her ex husband (the publisher).  DFW also re-introduces editor’s wife #3, Clarissa, with whom he is having violent but ineffectual sex as the scene closes.

CAROL ANSHAW-Week Twelve
Anshaw gives Una a personal moment as she and an unnamed man fight for the remote, rather than having sex.  Sparks fly as the veal picatta hits the olive oil.

IRVINE WELSH-Week Thirteen
Irvine Welsh  brings a heap of sex and violence to the story.  The man whom Una has picked up reveals that he is a spy and that the CIA is on to her (and that he is HIV+ and wants her to kill him).  Una says if the CIA knew about her, they’d take her out.   But, he says, the CIA needs terrorists and the government needs terrorists, for how else can the (the government) spread fear? Una, fearing that the man will just go on an on, dispatches him with an ashtray, but wishes she had been able to use her detonator.

GARY INDIANA-Week Fourteen
Indiana offers a surreal turn as he reveals the President to be none other than Pat Buchanan (and the first lady is his sister, Bay, whom he married after his previous wife died).  There’s a lot of sexual tension between the in-photo-only Bay and Una (and with Bay and Michah as well who claims he would like to have sex with the white women before he decapitates her).  All the while Una is dismembering a man named Judy (gay parents named their boys Judy back then).  She then jets to New Vatican City for sex with Pope Paul.

NEIL GORDON-Week Fifteen
Gordon ends the story rather satisfyingly.  Una kills the Pope (after sex of course), who was the mastermind behind all of her assassinations.  And as the “novel” wraps up, the comic final line obscures the potential danger than Una may be in.

For what it was, the novel was kind of fun and satisfying.  I don’t even know that I could pick a favorite section because each writing was trying to do something different, but none of them were outrageously original that their piece stood out.  A solid effort all around, and a fun experiment, too.

[READ: September 29, 2009] The Flexicon

“The Flexicon”. Parnassus: Poetry in Review Vol. 23 Nos. 1 & 2, 1998; pp. 180-194. [NOTES: 'An homage to the lexical richness of English' with contributions by Albert Goldbarth, Paul West, Diane Ackerman, DFW and others. Read it here. DFW's contribution is pp. 183-188.]

The Flexicon is designed as a word lover’s extravaganza.  It begins simply enough as a story in a grocery store.

ALBERT GOLDBARTH
Begins with the simple and rather jokey rhyme:
Do you know where the Cheez Whiz
That you squeeze is?

PAUL WEST
Moves the piece further with some delightful wordplay.  He keeps it in the grocery store, showing the man trying to seduce a woman in the ant trap section with delightful words like abonnement, shebang, and fistula.  There’s also a mildly obscene James Joyce joke.   It sets the bar high for obscure words.

DIANE ACKERMAN
She adds depth to our character by saying that he can only speak in rhyme.  ”Holy mole my goal is frijoles.”  He also has a list of 15 Things to Do Today  Like: 6. Auscultate silverfish.  8. Unzip tse tse fly.  and 15. Jactitate soundlessly.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
Creates an extra character, one who sneers at the very idea of the exercise.  He is a bag boy (or a chef, perhaps) who thinks this sort of lexical game was all well and good in 1965 or if you’re French but for a failed MFA student, it’s all hogwash.

His first bit of fun comes with a list of words that are more or less the opposite of what they look like (Big is a small word, Pulchritudinous is an ugly word).  But the fun of his section comes with the MFA teacher’s (who never earned his PhD he is proud to report)  golden rule: DON’T USE A BIG WORD WHEN A SMALL WORD WILL DO.  This leads to a glorious footnote which explains that even with this restriction, cryptorchid & exeleutherostomizes really are exactly the words that the author needed, because no other words match their definitions so precisely.

DFW’s section is quite fun and snarky.

MAC WELLMAN
Follows DFW with a three part poem which I must admit is beyond my ken.

SUSAN WHEELER
Has a lot of fun with some tiny poems that explore the various parts of speech of certain words: The prick pricked his prick; The weenies weaned their Weiners.  Although it tends to lose the thread of the “story.”

SUSAN YANKOWITZ
Has four paragraphs of internal rhyming nonsense and fun.  I don’t understand a word of it, but it’s fun to read aloud.

ALBERT GOLDBARTH
Reins in the story by bringing it back to food: “Cecilia was tough cookie.”

While overall this piece is nonsense and fluff, it is delightful to see and to say these words and phrases.  Oftentimes an exercise like this is sort of show-offy, and this has elements of that, but mostly it’s an excuse to have fun with words.  And the authors certainly do that.

La capital de Escocia, Edimburgo, es conocida por ser una ciudad turística muy importante a nivel mundial gracias, entre otras cosas, a la belleza de sus paisajes o al festival de eventos en vivo más grande del mundo, lo que conlleva la afluencia de unos trece millones de turistas al año. Se trata, por tanto, de una zona de interés cultural. Todo este encanto, en cambio, iba a verse turbado por la descripción de la “otra Edimburgo” en un relato vívido, duro y realista de la juventud de los 90: Trainspotting.
Corría el año 1993 cuando un joven Irvine Welsh publicaba su novela Trainspotting. El libro cuenta la historia de cinco jóvenes adictos a la heroína, desencantados de la vida por diferentes motivos, que buscan en la droga la evasión de la deprimente realidad que les rodea, y su día a día por el puerto de Edimburgo, Leith. Rápidamente se convirtió en un boom social pues usaba un estilo literario directo y sin tapujos, fiel reflejo de la sociedad que quería representar, a la vez que criticaba el orden socio-político implantado. Tres años después, Danny Boyle adaptó la novela al cine con gran acierto. Tanto el libro como la película son obras de culto en la sociedad contemporánea.

Los personajes de Trainspotting

El éxito de Trainspotting radica en el lenguaje empleado. Es un lenguaje coloquial, rozando y traspasando el límite de lo vulgar pues Welsh se pone en el pellejo de sus personajes para describir una realidad sin dudar en usar vocablos de la calle tales como palabrotas o expresiones burdas. Así, tenemos a Renton, Sick-Boy, Begbie, Spud y Mickey hablando en primera persona según el capítulo que corresponda. Gracias a la ágil pluma de Welch, no necesitamos que nos diga quién tiene la voz en cada capítulo ya que las muletillas de los personajes ayudan a reconocerlos. Cada uno tiene un lenguaje propio: Spud el dubitativo, Begbie el mal hablado, Sick-Boy el presumido… Con esto se logra una fácil conexión con el lector. Además, el libro se nutre de descripciones detalladas que aún aumentan el realismo patente.
La película es bastante fiel a la novela si bien omite algunos pasajes porque es
imposible adaptar letra a letra un libro. Sin duda, el libro es más completo y necesario para entender la realidad social escocesa porque los detalles están mejor definidos y perfilados. El significado del título del libro, “Trainspotting”, es una palabra empleada en Escocia para nombrar a aquellas
personas que se dedican a mirar pasar los trenes. O, citando textualmente la novela de Irvine Welsh: “es la forma más futil de pasar un tiempo con el que no se sabe qué hacer”. Justo lo que le pasa a sus personajes, perdidos en una sociedad que no les acepta y que ellos mismos rechazan.

On September 27:

1821 Mexico  gained its independence from Spain.

1905  The physics journal Annalen der Physik published Albert Einstein’s paper “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?”, introducing the equation E=mc².

 1938 The ocean liner Queen Elizabeth was launched in Glasgow.

Depiction of the RMS Queen Elizabeth.

1958 Scotttish author Irvine Welsh was born.

1968 The stage musical Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London.

Original Broadway poster

1974 William (Bill) Sutch was charged with spying.

 Sourced from Wikipedia and NZ History Online.

By Rory Reynolds

ONE of Scotland’s most violent football casuals has claimed that his thuggish behaviour has been good for the game.

Andy Blance – who has served jail time for a horrific axe attack – reckons that the streets are safer on match-days because hooligans’ violence attracted more attention from cops.

The 42-year-old, a former leader of the infamous Capital City Service gang, claims police should spend more time hunting other offenders than dealing with hooligans.

And, he said, officers ENJOY the running battles they have to police because they see it as a game.

Last night the Association of Chief Police Officers Scotland (ACPOS) reacted angrily to the claims, slamming Blance’s comments as “ludicrous”.

And a senior justice politician blasted his “bizarre” logic adding that increased police presence had made terraces safer – not brawling thugs.

Fight

Blance said: “I honestly think we had a positive impact on the game.

“It made grounds far safer places for normal people to go, because there were so many police brought in and the casuals had to find somewhere else to go to fight.

“Joe Bloggs in the street was safe because we were all somewhere else.

“A lot of people would have to admit that the casuals made it safer for normal fans to actually go to the game.

“It meant people could walk down the road to the game and no-one would bother them.

“We were fighting people that wanted to fight us.

“There are a lot worse people in the world than football hooligans, there are rapists and murderers out there – but football hooligans get all the attention.

Horrific

“Undoubtedly the police could spend their time and money much better than worrying about football hooligans.”

Blance was jailed for five years in 1991 after a horrific axe attack on a pub bouncer in Dunfermline.

The former bouncer has a criminal record with more than 50 offences.

After being released from prison Blance went back to battling rival firms with the CCS.

He insists that violence between rival club firms – often nearer to pitched street battles than brawls – is just a game, which even the police enjoy taking part in.

Blance said: “At the time it was the thing to do – it was like how in the sixties there were mods and rockers, in the seventies there were skinheads and punks.

Buzz

“In the eighties all that stuff was part of the culture, I was at an age to get into it – so I did.

“It was a buzz – it was a gang of guys fighting another gang of guys and it was about adrenaline and excitement.”

“It was all a game, we all knew what we were doing – even the police regarded it as a game.

“They liked nothing better than running at us all with their batons.

“It was cat and mouse – and they loved it too.”

But a spokesman for the ACPOS said: “The comments made in this book bear no relation to the true position with regard to the policing of football in Scotland.

‘Ludicrous’

“Police are deployed at football matches and in the surrounding areas simply to ensure public order and when a match passes off peacefully that is considered a successful operation.

“No officer would derive any benefit or pleasure from having to deal with disorder or hooligan behaviour. To say that hooligan behaviour somehow enhances the experience of football is, frankly, ludicrous.”

Bill Aitken MSP, Justice Spokesman for Scottish Conservatives, slammed Blance’s claims about police.

He said: “This mans logic is bizarre – I do not think for a moment that police officers enjoy putting themselves at risk, albeit armed with a truncheon in order to cope with football thugs.

“The increased police attention to football disturbances in recent years has cut the trouble significantly and allowed decent, normal fans the opportunity to enjoy games in peace.”

Blance insists he’s now just a regular fan, but has recently released a book – called Hibs Boy – charting his experience of two and a half decades of football violence with the CCS.

The book – which launched in April – contains a foreword by best-selling Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh – a friend of Blance’s.

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Trainspotting | Danny Boyle, 1996

Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting is one of those films that always crops up on Top British Movie lists. It’s often used as a benchmark and quite rightly so, such is the impact it had upon independent filmmaking in the United Kingdom during that particular period. Only recently it topped a Channel 4 poll to find the Best British Film, a somewhat suspicious accolade seeing that the broadcasting company actually produced the film back in 1995. Either way it made a resounding impression, enough to become somewhat synonymous with the term ‘influential’; a label that may be accurate to a point, though I’d say the word ‘influenced’ better fits this particular gem. Trainspotting is a frenetically-paced shot-to-the-arm (pardon the pun) of drug culture in nineties Britain, one that follows a pale and skinny addict named Renton (played by Ewan McGregor) as he attempts to shake the habit. Set and shot primarily in Scotland, the film is a trimmed-down adaptation of Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh’s book of the same name. Having not yet experienced my teen years when Trainspotting arrived, I’ve always found it quite difficult to comment on this film. The culture idolised here is and has always been somewhere out of reach. I see it, just as I did as a kid, represented as the class above me in school. I see the clothes and I hear the songs yet still somehow find difficulty when attempting to relate. It feels somewhat underwhelming to look at it in this way and from a fresh standpoint, for the film itself achieved near legendary status among the youth of nineties Britain when it was released back in 1996.

Trainspotting is part of a wave of indie filmmaking that gripped Britain during the nineties and was influenced in no small amount by a certain industry-defying American movie named Pulp Fiction. Much like this earlier effort the film draws heavily upon pop culture – ideas, idols and images from all over. The slew of references one can notice becomes somewhat dizzying in places, and seemingly random in the greater scheme of things. Still, they go a long way in creating an overall tone that is maintained throughout. Of these aforementioned references Boyle spends a great deal of effort, for example, comparing his group of run-down addicts to the Beatles. A decision sometimes subtly realised – the scene where a blanket-covered Renton wakes up after a one-night stand and says “hello” to someone passing through the hallway, reminiscent of a scene in the 1965 film Help! – and on other occasions quite blatantly drilled home – the scene where our characters cross a street in London, shot to resemble the cover of Abbey Road. And Boyle doesn’t stop there: James Bond, Montgomery Clift, Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America; and these are just some of the easier nods to spot. Trainspotting is a visceral experience and one that succeeds in tapping into the nineties subculture in Britain where so many others failed. It does so, however, without wishing to say too much, despite taking what is clearly an anti-drugs stance. Boyle doesn’t wish to bash his viewer over the head with messages – just visuals – and while this is quite an admirable feat in itself, it still somehow detracts from the end product: there is a shallowness here that eluded me in the past.

Our Rating:

N-am citit cartea Trainspotting de Irvine Welsh, dar am vazut filmul, care mi-a facut o impresie buna, asa ca, atunci cand am dat pe un raft de Porno, scrisa de acelasi autor, am luat-o.

Am avut surprinderea sa constat ca e mai groasa decat ma asteptam, adica are vreo 600 de pagini. Dat fiind stilul autorului, se reduce la vreo 400 de citit efectiv, pentru ca din 3 in 3 cuvinte apar expresii gen p**a mea sau mui*tul cutare.

Cartea are ca protagonisti tot pe cei din Trainspotting, daca ii mai tineti minte, ca eu nu imi mai amintesc decat de Ewan McGregor si de super amuzantul si paranoicul Robert Carlyle, dupa 10 ani de la acele patanii. Unul dintre ei vine cu ideea sa faca un film porno si intreaga carte se invarte in jurul acestei initiative intelectuale. Narativul e format din filtrele interioare ale celor mai importante personaje, care interactioneaza intre ele, un fel de Ma numesc Rosu cu escroci, drogati si curve, aceste atribute fiind, in cele mai multe dintre cazuri, la pachet. Dintre aceste voci, am remarcat-o pe cea a paranoicului si pe a unei tipe asemanatoare Curvettei in zilele ei bune.

Dimensiunea cartii ii aduce cel mai mare neajuns. Fara a fi scrisa nasol, ba chiar avand cateva momente de umor negru de calitate, e totusi prea lunga. Iar repetitia expresiilor argotice mai sus mentionate e pur si simplu excesiva, asa ca, la un moment dat, trivialitatea nu face decat sa fie obositoare.

Niste povestioare porcoase, scurte si la obiect, ar fi mers mult mai bine decat acest mamut inutil, chit ca e scris el de Irvine Welsh.

Rupert: A Confession belongs to that genre of writing called the compulsive explainer, which features a narrator who is unable to control his need to explain the world, often in intricate detail, as he sees it even if it is in his best interest not to explain so much. It can be a difficult way of writing because the obsessions of the narrator can overwhelm a reader with the obscure or the tangential. To that compulsion Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer adds an unreliable narrator. The unreliable narrator adds a different complication: how does one tell the reader the narrator is lying without the narrator having to explain the lie? Weaker writers will just have the narrator say two different things at two different times. Yet unless the narrator has gone through some shift the statements are forced or awkward. Why did the narrator sudden decide to say this? Is it because the writer needs to tell me the narrator is unreliable? Irvine Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares is an example of this. On the other hand, the narrator who does not know they are unreliable is the truly difficult and interesting approach because not only does it keep the character in character, it gives more work to the reader forcing her to puzzle out the unreliability from the clues within the story. Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy is a excellent example of this precision in characterization.

Pfeijffer successfully combines the two elements the obsessive and the unreliable to create Rupert. Rupert is on trial for something what it is isn’t clear, but what ever it is Rupert feels the need to explain his innocence in great detail. The detail, though, is not a counter argument of the facts, but a brief history of his affair with Mira and the days after. Rupert, though, is a pervert and he’d gets more pleasure in going to a peep show than actually having sex wit his girl friend. He is also quite graphic when he describes his encounter in the peep show and his dreams, and it is an obvious tip off that Rupert, despite his claims to the contrary, is not completely aware of what a courtroom nor society in general thinks is proper behavior. Telling a court that you are stalking an old girlfriend and still love her only suggests madness and violence. As the novel progresses Rupert becomes more obsessive, yet each time he makes the claim it is obvious he is only becoming more unhinged, losing grasp of the boundaries between desire and stalking.

The trial is the perfect contrasting device for the unreliability because Pfeijffer can let Rupert’s story, his obsession, flow naturally in Rupert’s voice. At first Rupert seems a little strange, but not manically obssesed, just a lonely man in a permissive country. As he goes farther into his story, though, it becomes obvious that what he is narrating is probably not true. The distance between how he has behaved in earlier scenes contrasts too heavily with the behavior he claims at the end.

Rupert: A Confession is a tense novel. The coming expectation of some great misdeed flows throughout the novel and over the last 30 pages the question is, is this what landed him in jail? To say what happened would ruin the novel, but the sense of coming disaster animates the book and keeps his obsessions from the tangential. Another source of the tension is the constant fixation of sex. Titillating, as Publishers Weekly said, is the wrong word for the seedy depths that Rupert visits as he seeks to fulfill his fantasies. Had his fantasies with Mira been reality and the reality non existent, the book would be titillating. Instead, coupling the violence and sense of foreboding confront the reader with questions: what happens when eroticism you are enjoying as a spectator (the reader) turns dark? Does it turn the former experience into a mistake, something shameful, or are they two different things? Ultimately, does using the surrogate, Rupert, for some distant enjoyment place one in the same dark peep show where Rupert first shows his obsessive side?

Rupert is also an architectural novel. Pfeijffer uses the city and the spaces within it as a way to distance Rupert from greater human contact. Rupert sees more in the city, its squares, its buildings, and can understand them better than the people in them. He knows how to analyze, not how to connect:

Fredo square is not like that, but it does its best. When it’s on form and happy because it’s being kissed by a sultry summer evening, it can mirror the perfection of the Palio. Then it can stop looking and smile like a brushing bride who embraces you and is grateful and all is well. She stretches herself out comfortably on the soft bed of the humming city, blissfully certain that she is loved.

Towards the end of the novel as Rupert is trying to find Mira in the winding streets of the old part of town, he blends the language of the erotic with the architectural, removing any humanity from Mira and turning her into an object. At the same time, though, the complex eroticism previously mentioned returns, because the city as Rupert sees it is truly erotic. The architecture becomes the reflection and the shape of the inhabitants, and as such is both beautiful and ugly, and in Rupert: A Confession, also a place for shame and titillation.

Rupert: A Confession is a brief novel, but in its 130 pages Pfeijffer is able to master one of the more difficult things in fiction, the unreliable narrator, and that makes it well worth the read.

O jornal inglês “The Observer” divulgou ontem a lista dos melhores filmes ingleses desde 1984.

O clássico e único Trainspotting de 1996 faturou o primeiro lugar. Já era de se esperar.

A lista:

1º “Trainspotting” (1996), de Danny Boyle
2º “Os desajustados” (1987), de Bruce Robinson
3º “Segredos e mentiras” (1996), de Mike Leigh
4º “Vozes distantes” (1988), de Terence Davies
5º “Minha adorável lavanderia” (1985), de Stephen Frears
6º “Violento e profano” (1997), de Gary Oldman
7º “Sexy beast” (2000), de Jonathan Glazer
8º “O lixo e o sonho” (1999), de Lynne Ramsay
9º “Quem quer ser um milionário?” (2008), de Danny Boyle
10º “Quatro casamentos e um funeral” (1994), de Mike Newell
11º “Desafio vertical” (2003), de Kevin MacDonald
12º “Esperança e glória” (1987), de John Boorman
13º “Control” (2007), de Anton Corbijn
14º “Naked” (1993), de Mike Leigh
15º “Under the skin” (1997), de Carine Adler

Repare que trainspotting passou na frente inclusive de: “Quem quer ser um milionário”, filme este do mesmo diretor e que faturou 4 Oscars neste ano.

Trainspotting é uma adaptação de um romance homônimo do escritor Irvine Welsh, o longa de 1996 conta a história de um grupo de jovens escoceses que mergulham no submundo para manter o vício em heroína entre roubos e confusões.

“Trainspotting”  revelou o ator Ewan McGregor, que interpreta o protagonista Mark Renton. Este recentemente disse que a possível continuação do filme (já existente em livro) não seria realizada. Ewan pensa que não quer estragar uma obra prima criando uma continuação que com certeza não chegará aos pés de Trainspotting.

Capa do livro continuação de “Trainspotting”: Porno, de Irvine Welsh

Curta abaixo o trailer deste que é meu filme favorito e o de muitos amigos também: